Brenda McHale loves to play with words, either as a writer or as a copy editor and proofreader. Her working life has spanned over 30 jobs from making chip pan baskets to childhood practitioner, so it’s perhaps not surprising that her writing is also eclectic. She has featured in The People’s Friend, Northwards Now, Reader’s Read More
Rhoda Neville has lived in several old houses in Scotland, England, and the States. She’s taken in hand the renovation and preservation of several of them, always sensitive to their relevance as living histories of the people who have occupied them. Much of Rhoda’s writing—she started using her grandfather’s Hermes Rocket field typewriter at thirteen—has Read More
Elaine Burke is a writer of fiction, with a particular interest in crime. As a child she devoured the Famous Five, Secret Seven and Nancy Drew books and, at secondary school, her English teacher encouraged her to pursue her passion in literature. She left school at 17 to attend the University of Stirling, where she Read More
Ducks, Newburyport is Lucy Ellmann’s eighth novel. This is a big book by any standard. In it I met a woman who made me look at the world her way: a working Mom, anxious about her four children, worried about Trump, the state of America, gun violence, and broken by the death of her mother, Read More
After a long apprenticeship in healthcare, with a short detour in education, William Hume (aka Ian) arrived in Dundee with no other expectations than to develop his writing skills. The rigour of workshops, seminars, tutorials, reading, writing and feedback exercises that followed directed his interests into poetry and essay writing, a few samples from his Read More
Jane Swanson has been putting words on paper and creating imaginary worlds since childhood. For many years she worked as an archaeologist, uncovering hidden narratives from deep beneath the ground, and later as a teacher, sharing her love of stories and writing with young children. She writes short stories, creative non-fiction, and reviews of fiction Read More
Kai Durkin has been a university student for the past 5 years, and likes to pretend they didn’t exist before that. They completed their undergrad in English and Creative Writing, and their MLitt in Writing Practice and Study, at the University of Dundee. They enjoy writing in a variety of mediums, but they especially love Read More
A 36-year-old queer working-class migrant arrives on the Isle of Wight and gets a job with best friend Shae in a trashy hotel with an absent boss and equally hard to pin down wages. Attempts to gain citizenship amidst the Brexit chaos are constantly thwarted, UKIP supporters lurk on street corners, and an alcoholic parent Read More
Amy Arnold’s novel Slip of a Fish is an exuberant exploration into whether language can be trusted to convey meaning; the protagonist, Ash, collects words as a way of coping with the confusion they cause her, whilst Arnold’s own inventive literary styling gradually exposes this complex inner mind to readers. Abbott says there’s no need, Read More
The Man Who Saw Everything is Deborah Levy’s seventh novel and her third, along with Swimming Home and Hot Milk to be nominated for the Man Booker Prize. Levy has also written plays and short stories, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The novel’s protagonist, Saul Adler, narrates two separate incidents Read More