Esmé Louise James is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne in the faculty of English and Theatre Studies. Her thesis investigates the emerging genre of the pornographic novel in the eighteenth-century, and its relation to aesthetic discourse of the time.
She is best known for her irreverent lecture series on TikTok, Kinky History, which boasts a following of over 2 million people from around the world. In 2020, she was listed in the Top 30 Emerging Writers by SBS Australia.
She has produced a range of poetry, short-stories, and non-fiction articles in publications such as Hardie Grant Press, The Conversation, The Age, and Archer Magazine. Esmé has authored two novels, Honeyflower and Pansy (2014) and The Awakening (2017); the former becoming an Amazon bestseller within a month of its release.
In 2021, Esmé was the joint recipient (alongside her mother) of Screen Australia’s Every Voice initiative which has funded the creation of a new series on TikTok; SexTistics is a 10-part series which uses statistics to create a snapshot of gender, sexuality, and identity within contemporary Australia.
