I write long and short fiction, poetry and non-fiction. My novel ‘The Falling Sky’, about a female astronomer who discovers the Universe and loses her mind, was one of three finalists for the Dundee International Book Prize 2012 and is published this Spring by Freight Books.
I have a PhD in astronomy and worked as an astronomer for several years at Imperial College, where I studied quasars and galaxies in the early Universe using data collected from telescopes and satellites. I’m a graduate of the MLitt course in creative writing at the University of Glasgow and from 2007 to 2008 I was one of the editors of the MLitt course e-magazine; From Glasgow to Saturn.
I was a winner of a Scottish Book Trust/Creative Scotland New Writers Award for 2011/2012.
I was a writer in residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum (based at the University of Edinburgh) from 2008 to 2010 and I’m still affiliated there. During my residency I ran competitions for short stories and poems inspired by genetics, and held workshops on fiction and writing for social scientists. I also gave public talks on the links between fiction, poetry and science.
I was also a writer-in-residence at the Wigtown Book Festival in 2012 where I blogged on the ‘dark skies’ theme of the festival.
I’ve been a guest reader on an Arvon course and I’ve given a reading of some of my flash fictions at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. You can listen to a podcast of one of them here. I’m a regular contributor to Lablit. And I eat (far) too many biscuits when I’m trying to write…
