Cora Sheibani: How a Dealer's Daughter Built a Jewellery Career

Jeweller Cora Sheibani bought her first two rings at 15 — one Greek, one Roman, both bronze — with half her summer earnings from working in her parents' gallery. Today she works primarily in gold from a small studio in Mayfair, London, and runs a business she says she is "incredibly proud of."

Sheibani grew up inside the art world. Her father was the celebrated Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger, who collaborated with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol and Francesco Clemente. Francesco Clemente remains a close family friend, his daughters "more like my cousins." The Schnabel family are close too, and the kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely was her sister's godfather.

"I'm lucky to have grown up around artists and people who didn't follow the conventional path," she says.

What does dyslexia have to do with it?

Sheibani is dyslexic and, as a child, reading was "just too hard." She barely read at all. Even so, she made herself study liberal arts before becoming a jeweller, and only after university did she start reading German literature — her mother language.

Dyslexia, she argues, taught her patience and perseverance. Those traits carried her through a rough start in the trade. "It was hard to be taken seriously as a jeweller at the beginning," she says. "People thought it was a hobby, and I really had to be patient and persevere."

Her material choice has a simple origin: yellow is her favourite colour. But she adds that experience taught her gold is "the friendliest metal to handle."

Books as a working tool

For Sheibani, luxury is having time. An autistic son with severe ADHD takes much of her attention, so travel is limited. She travels through books instead, and reading has become her way to experience culture, art and creativity.

Jewellery books and exhibition catalogues feed directly into her work. An essay by Amin Jaffer in the catalogue for Joyaux Dynastiques — a show of royal jewels at the Hôtel de la Marine in Paris last year — explained the meaning of a particular kind of nine-gem Indian jewel. It helped her with a commission from a client for a piece using nine different coloured stones.

She buys early editions from Shapero Rare Books in Mayfair, which she passes on every walk from the gym to the studio. Her latest finish: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in its first English translation by Frederick Whishaw — a rare collector's item. "It's generally thought that translations have improved, but there's something special about reading a contemporaneous one," she says. "It's a rich experience that takes you back in time."

Scrambled eggs and a three-woman book club

Once a month, usually on a Friday morning, Sheibani meets her book club — just three members — at Daria Buchman's house for a breakfast of scrambled eggs. They don't read the same book; they talk about what each is reading.

Daria, who with her husband Dimitry sponsors the International Booker Prize, is "really on top of every new novel." Yet she hadn't read Toni Morrison's Beloved. Sheibani, having read three works on slavery from different regional angles — Beloved, Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior and Ben Okri's The Last Gift of the Master Artists — recommended the group do the same. You begin to understand, she says, how lives on one continent evolved in such different, and at times similar, ways.

The exchange cuts both ways: Daria insisted she read Wuthering Heights, a book Sheibani admits she would never have picked up on her own. Her reading life, like her career, runs on other people's persistence — and her own.