Iris Lambert

Iris Lambert was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine in the spring of 1994, the only child of an English literary publisher and a French literary translator. Her childhood unfolded fortnightly between her father's house in Crouch End and her mother's flat in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, two households joined by books and recordings and the small upright piano on which she began playing, at six, the keyboard exercises that would become her life's grammar.

She entered the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris at eighteen, intending a performance career. By the time she finished, with the Premier Prix in piano in 2015, she had begun to suspect that what interested her most about music happened off the stage. She moved to London for a Master's in composition at the Royal Academy of Music in the autumn of that year and never returned to public performance.

A short cue written in 2016 for a friend's graduation film at the National Film and Television School won the BFI Emerging Composer Award. Within eighteen months she was scoring documentaries and small features full time.

The work that followed has been quiet, deliberate, and recognisable within bars. Lambert writes chamber music for the screen: piano figures held against single counter-lines, occasional cello, viola or low woodwind, the occasional carefully placed field recording. She has spoken in interviews of her interest in what is left out, the sentence not finished, the chord not voiced. Slack Water (2024), a film about the last working family in a Hebridean fishing village, brought her work to wider attention. Her score, eleven cues for piano, viola and a single field recording of a foghorn she made herself off Ullapool, was nominated for a BAFTA and reissued on vinyl by the Berlin imprint Edition Mond, which sold out three pressings in a month.

In 2027 she scored Le Mans, the Horizon Pictures feature documentary directed by Esther Vaun, marking her largest commission in film to date. The soundtrack album was released ahead of the film and stands on its own as her most ambitious scored release.

She has signed a four-part adaptation for Apple TV, currently in production between Wales and Patagonia, scheduled for 2029.

She works from a converted Victorian dairy in Hackney with a 1962 Steinway upright in walnut, one large window, and a great deal of silence.