Hey there, you’re looking sharp today!

You’d like to read about Marina Gerner, so here we go: Marina is an award-winning journalist, writer and professor based in London.

At the moment, she is working on a non-fiction book about femtech, sextech, women’s health and pleasure. It will be published by Sourcebooks (US) and Icon Books (UK). She has received a book grant from the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for her work-in-progress.

Two brilliant literary agents represent her: Hattie Grünewald at The Blair Partnership (London) and Jaidree Braddix at Park & Fine (New York).

In 2020, she was chosen as an Emerging Writer at the London Library, where Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Isaiah Berlin and Agatha Christie were members.

As a journalist, she has written about books and arts, as well as finance and tech. Her range of expertise has led to Marina being called “a Renaissance woman of the modern age” by The New York Times a friend.

Her work (which is to say my work, since I’m writing this text and just pretending not to) has been published in: The Economist’s 1843, Jewish Chronicle, Guardian, Financial Times, Wired, the Times Literary Supplement, The Times/ Sunday Times’ Raconteur special reports, the i paper, MoneyWeek, Standpoint, and the Wall Street Journal. She has been a guest speaker on the BBC World Service.

Previously she was a contributing editor at the The Times special reports section Raconteur (where she created the Sustainable Investment report) and the i newspaper (where she was in charge of a monthly financial supplement), as well as a markets editor at MoneyWeek. Before that she was a staff writer at Money Observer, where she wrote a column called “Marina’s Imaginary Millions.” She’s part of Women in Journalism, where she is a mentor.

Like all good hacks, she has a few awards to her name. In 2018, she won the h100 Young Critic of the Year Award for her “witty and incisive” column on the ironies of ideology and Russian revolution art. In 2016, she won the National Financial Journalist Newcomer of the Year Santander Media Award “with glowing praise from the judges who liked her critical edge, hands on advice and depth of research”. She was shortlisted for a Headline Money Award (and is now one of the judges), two Unbiased Media Awards and highly commended at the British Journalism Awards (Business Sustainability category, 2018) for uncovering weapons in Barclay’s “social impact” fund and highly commended at Headlinemoney (Business Story of the Year, 2021) for her feature “We need to talk about investors problem with vaginas.”

When she’s not writing, she likes to teach: She is an Adjunct Professor of Commerce & Culture at the NYU Stern School of Business (on their London campus). She completed her PhD at the London School of Economics in 2015, where she taught Masters students and gave lectures on the MSc Global Media and International Journalism Summer School. In 2014, she was a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Sociology Department and Journalism School in New York.

If you think all of this sounds impressive, rest assured that her list of rejections and failures is much longer than the list of achievements you see here.

She was born in Kyiv during the Soviet Union. When Marina was a toddler, her brave single mother moved them to the West as refugees.

If you like what you read here, you can message her at “contact” and follow her on Twitter: @MarinaSGerner Or else, find her on the dance floor.

Thanks to Joe for spotting my rather direct sentence in The Penguin Book of British Short Stories

Loved having a column called Marina’s Imaginary Millions at Money Observer, where I covered everything from my landlords to what Brexit means for the price of tomatoes.