Maria Zeb Benjamin is a writer, living and working on a small family farm in the Lake District.

Born in Scotland in 1972 to a Canadian mother and Pakistani father, Maria Zeb Benjamin and her five siblings grew up in and around Edinburgh. After a period of unstable housing, she travelled solo across South America before living and working in Hong Kong and South Korea. In her mid-twenties, she began studying Fine Art, eventually gaining a Master’s degree from Goldsmiths College, London.

She co-founded Guestroom, a curated annual art publication, and worked as a freelance camera operator and editor on artists’ films, as well as selling olives at Borough Market.

In 2015, Maria joined her partner, John, on his family’s farm in the Lake District. Over the following decade she learned to work with livestock and established several farm diversification businesses.

During lockdown, she began to write.

Her debut memoir, A Night in the Lambing Shed, will be published by Little Toller Books in March 2027. Unfolding over a single night of lambing, it moves between life in the lambing shed and memories of an earlier life, exploring family, identity and belonging, and what it means to find a place in a landscape and way of life you weren't born into.