About

I’m a writer and artist living in Manchester.  I used to teach Creative Writing at University, but now I write full time, make artists’ books and teach Victorian wet plate photography workshops with my partner, the lovely and talented John Brewer, who is a historical photographic artist.

My first novel, The Monster’s Wife, is due out in paperback and eBook with Barbican Press in June 2014.  Following in the tradition of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly, The Monster’s Wife is a literary gothic that re-envisions Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein from the perspective of the girl Victor Frankenstein transformed into a Bride for his monster.  Oona Scollay is a sixteen-year-old scullery maid living on Hoy, a tiny island in Orkney in 1798.  When her best friend May disappears, Oona starts asking questions, but her search is thwarted by the conflicted loyalties within her close-knit community.  When she turns up shocking evidence, Oona becomes the next victim.  A prisoner in a dark room, living a hellish distortion of life, Oona must find a way to escape before her captor completes his plans for revenge.

My poems and short fiction have been published in a number of magazines and anthologies including Storyglossia, Erbacce, Seventh Quarry Magazine, Bliss and Best British Crime Stories and my work has won awards - Sentinel Literary Quarterly Poetry Competition, Words on the Street and Adoption Matters - and been shortlisted for Asham, Templar, Longworth Editors, Fine Line and Ravenglass Press and I’m represented by Allan Guthrie at Jenny Brown Associates.  When I’m not writing, I can be found taking photographs and collecting weird and wonderful objects – Victorian scientific slides, puffer fish, dolls’ heads and anatomical models – for our growing cabinet of curiosities.