The cemetery is the setting for the Victorian poet Charlotte Mew's exploration of death, insanity and social alienation" In Nunhead Cemetery" and is the setting for Maurice Riordan's final poem, "The January Birds" in "The Holy Land", his 2007 collection. "The Woman Between the Worlds", a 1994 science fiction novel by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre set in Victorian England, depicts the burial at Nunhead Cemetery in 1898 (in a closed coffin) of a female extraterrestrial. The novel avoids citing a precise location for this grave, in case some reader believes that alien remains can be retrieved from the site.