Charlotte Cripps

Charlotte Cripps is a senior culture writer at The Independent whose entertainment coverage is driven by first-person essays that connect celebrity stories with the lived realities of parenting, fertility and sobriety. She specialises in profile interviews and culture features, but often writes in the first person, using her own experiences to illuminate wider social and emotional currents around fame and family life. Her work sits at the point where celebrity culture, domestic routines and personal turning points meet, making her coverage more intimate and reflective than a straightforward showbusiness news beat.

First-person culture commentary

A defining strand of Cripps’s work is opinion-led culture writing anchored in her own life, often framed by high-profile entertainment figures. In a piece about Bradley Cooper’s sobriety, she uses the renewed attention on his recovery to explore the social awkwardness and stigma that non-drinkers face, grounding the article in her long-term abstinence and the intrusive questions that follow. Her article on Prince Harry’s return and Prince William’s likely feelings uses the royal brothers as a lens for sibling dynamics, estrangement and reconciliation, giving the story emotional texture rather than focusing on palace manoeuvring.

Across these pieces, the celebrity angle provides the hook, but the narrative is built from her perspective, with detail about everyday interactions and internal reactions that a generic entertainment report would leave out.

Parenting, fertility and family stories

Cripps repeatedly returns to parenting and fertility as core subjects, treating them as part of her entertainment and lifestyle beat rather than as separate “family” coverage.

Her long-running column at The Independent focused on IVF and single motherhood, combining humour with frank accounts of treatment, expectations and the emotional cost of trying to have children later in life. A piece on Naomi Campbell having a baby at 53 unpacks the medical realities of conception at that age and the role of egg freezing, surrogacy and IVF, cutting through the glamour of celebrity motherhood with clear explanations of probability, clinic practice and timelines.

In more domestic mode, she writes about her children’s boredom during the summer holidays, arguing that unstructured time away from screens can be positive, and details the practical strategies she uses to keep them occupied without over-scheduling. Another article describes her enthusiasm for buying an expensive Dior perfume for her five-year-old, using the purchase to explore ideas of indulgence, money, and how luxury goods fit into ordinary family life.

These pieces build a consistent picture of a writer who treats fertility treatment, parenting choices and household decisions as central cultural stories, not private footnotes.

Celebrity scrutiny and online behaviour

Cripps also focuses on how celebrities and their families are treated in the age of social media, with particular attention to online shaming. In her article defending Paris Hilton’s baby from mockery over the size of the child’s head, she examines the speed and cruelty of Instagram reactions, the language used to criticise a nine-month-old, and the emotional impact of viral ridicule on parents. She balances description of specific comments with a broader argument about empathy and the normal range of infant appearance, moving the piece beyond gossip into a critique of audience behaviour and platform culture. Even when writing about consumer choices, such as choosing an expensive perfume for a young child, she ties the decision back to the pressures and judgments that come with sharing family life publicly and the way luxury branding intersects with social expectations. This emphasis on the moral and psychological fallout of celebrity exposure distinguishes her from reporters who focus on casting news, box office or promotional cycles.

Lifestyle, travel and cultural forms

Alongside entertainment and parenting, Cripps writes lifestyle and travel pieces that keep the same personal, observational tone.

In a feature on taking a “coolcation” in the UK during a heatwave, she narrates a family seaside trip that turns disappointingly cold, describing arcade games and damp beaches as a counterpoint to the imagined escape from extreme temperatures. Her summer boredom article doubles as a light-touch manifesto for low-tech childhood, blending advice from experts with her own household experiments. Earlier in her career she wrote about the rise of Twitter poetry, examining how micropoetry forms such as “twihaiku” were reshaping the way poets use social platforms. Taken together, these pieces show her interest in how cultural forms - from social media-poetry hybrids to family holidays - influence everyday experience, rather than treating them purely as leisure or tech trends.

Profile interviews and culture desk experience

Cripps’s author biography emphasises her specialism in profile interviews, pointing to a strand of work that focuses on in-depth conversations with figures from across culture. Before her current writing role, she worked on The Independent’s culture desk as an arts editor and commissioning editor, experience that informs her eye for which stories can carry a strong narrative and where a subject’s personal history intersects with broader cultural shifts.

She began her career writing for magazines including Tatler and Harpers & Queen, then joined The Independent as a writer, giving her a mix of glossy feature and newspaper culture backgrounds.

Her professional listings describe her as a writer and editor working across entertainment, culture and related topics, and she has also been featured in a spiritualist magazine in a reported piece about sitting with a medium, extending her portfolio into more niche belief-focused culture writing. This combination of commissioning experience and hands-on interviewing sits behind her current work, where profiles, essays and lifestyle features share the same concern with character, choice and the emotional weight of cultural life.