Cohorts

Elle Nash

Elle Nash is the author of the novels Gag Reflex (Clash Books, 2022) and Animals Eat Each Other, and the short story collection Nudes. Her most recent novel is Deliver Me, is out now with Verve Press.

Her work appears in Guernica, BOMB, The Nervous Breakdown, Literary Hub, The Fanzine, Volume 1 Brooklyn, New York Tyrant and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine, teaches Knife Party, a creative writing workshop, and runs Goth Book Club online at femalerage.substack.com. She can be found online at instagram.com/saderotica or ellenash.net

Elle is currently working on a fiction manuscript that explores the effects of generational trauma on how we learn to love and on reactive abuse within marriages. It’s a project she's been working on since 2021 and the first third of the story is drafted and there. It’s a “road novel” — meaning the characters travel a fair bit, so the setting is dynamic. While at the retreat she is hoping to feel inspired by the different landscapes and complete a decent amount of work on the middle part of the story — act 2 — while at the retreat. Her goal is to have a first draft finished by the end of year!

Heather Parry

Heather Parry is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her debut novel, Orpheus Builds a Girl, was shortlisted for the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year award and longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. She is also the author of a short story collection, This Is My Body, Given For You, and a short nonfiction book, Electric Dreams: On Sex Robots and the Failed Promises of Capitalism, and writes the Substack general observations on eggs.

She was raised in Rotherham and lives in Glasgow with her partner and their cats, Fidel and Ernesto.

While at Write Toscana Heather will be working on her second short story collection, to be published in 2026.

Ross McCleary

Ross McCleary is a writer from Edinburgh. He is a fiction writer, poet, and spoken word performer, who has performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe on a number of occasions. In 2016, his first book Portrait of the Artist as a Viable Alternative to Death was published by Maudlin House Press in Chicago. In 2019 he was awarded a New Writer's Award for Fiction from the Scottish Book Trust and the same year his debut pamphlet, Endorse Me, You Cowards! was published by Stewed Rhubarb.

His writing often focuses on people who are isolated, panicking, paranoid, or bored, and stories of his in this vein can be found in the Baltimore Review, Intrepidus, and Extra Teeth.

He's currently drafting a novel about an Office Temp who believes his colleagues are spying on him, and is hoping that the Italian countryside might offer some unusual inspiration for this, or at least some respite from his own Office job where he is sure, nay certain, that he is being spied on as well. .

Kat Coyle

Kat Coyle is a fiction writer from Glasgow. Her first novel Salvaging was recently shortlisted for the Watson, Little x Indie Novella Prize 2023. Over the last decade her short stories have been published in multiple anthologies and she enjoys experimenting with both contemporary and historical settings in her work. More recently, the main focus of her novel and short stories has been the pertinent theme of climate change.

When she isn’t writing, Kat is a comedy improviser in training, performing at the occasional show in Glasgow. She is also a Digital Account Manager for an Edinburgh based agency by day, a role which helps her to stay up to speed with emerging technologies which often find their way into her creative work.

This year Kat has been focused on completing the final revisions of her novel. She hopes Write Toscana will offer breathing space to create a framework for structuring her next novel and hopefully the time to begin writing it too.

Furthermore, Tuscany holds a special place in her heart. Kat lived in Madrid for four years and spent one summer living in Tuscany teaching English. During her time there she felt inspired to record the details of her trip in a notebook. When she returned to Madrid, Kat started travel writing for The Island Review, with a focus on interviewing female authors who had published books about island life and identity.

During the pandemic she completed a nature writing course which inspired her to start a blog: https://burrowing.org/. The blog has laid dormant lately but she hopes her time in Italy will inspire her to create another nature writing diary, in addition to her main project.

Kirsteen Bell

Kirsteen Bell is a writer of narrative non-fiction. All her words are gathered from the croft in Lochaber where she lives, and the surrounding Scottish Highlands. She is interested in the ways in which humans perceive and interact with the landscape, and the ways in which the living landscape perceives and interacts with us.

Her writing and reviews can be found in such places as The Guardian Country Diary, Caught by the River, Gutter Magazine, Northwords Now, Imagined Spaces, Northern Scotland Journal, The Nature Library, Lochaber Times, and The Oban Times.

Eris Young

Eris Young is a queer, transgender author of speculative fiction and nonfiction. Their short work has appeared in publications including Pseudopod, Fusion Fragment, the Scottish National, and the Immigrant Sci Fi Short Stories anthology from Flame Tree Press. Their books They/Them/Their and Ace Voices were published by Jessica Kingsley in 2019 and 2022. In 2023 their novel-in-progress, Idomeneja, was longlisted for the Cheshire Novel Prize, and in 2020 they received a Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award for fiction. They are represented by Alex Cochran at C&W Agency.

Eris Young Website >>

Amy Needham

I am the main character in a novel called ‘She Who Could Live Anywhere (Called Moscow)’. I was born just outside of Oldham in Saddleworth, near a farm called Moscow in 1980. At age 18, I decided to take a degree at the Department of Russian & Slavonic Studies at the University of Sheffield (Sheffield – a city built on seven hills, like Rome, and like Moscow, which is known in Russia as the ‘Third Rome’). Ten years in real Moscow ensued, studying at the State Institute for International Relations and managing communications for the Association of European Businesses, Kaspersky Lab and AIDS Foundation East-West, an NGO working in the prison and healthcare services of Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

In 2013, I left Moscow and went to live in Moscow. Moscow, East Ayrshire, is where I met my husband, Jeremy, with whom I have a seven-year-old daughter, Daisy. The area we live in is, to put it bluntly, a moorland bog. You could say I started life in a moorland bog, and always end up in one somehow (when I lived in Japan for a year as a teacher, I lived in a district of Tokyo called Motohasunuma, Bog of the Lotus Flower).

My working life since moving to the UK has largely been media relations and PR for various industries, including renewables and construction. I’m very happy with that: having grown up in the construction world (my dad worked on concrete plants), I believe this industry is the best place to find interesting people, and it is so often disparaged and overlooked.

Why Write Toscana?

As you may have gathered, I enjoy making strange (tenuous) connections between things. I enjoy anything that questions the nature of reality (including attempts at understanding quantum physics), the supernatural, the surreal (favourite novelist: Mikhail Bulgakov), magic, mayhem, and the Gothic. Mary Shelley is, naturally, one of my favourite authors, and everyone knows the story about the 1816 summer in the Villa Diodati, where she found the space, confidence, and creative spark that she needed to develop her own voice. If I can do that, even if any fiction that I write is destined for some boxes in my attic, I will have achieved my goals at Write Toscana. As the magician Voland says to Margarita: “Manuscripts do not burn” («Рукописи не горят»); published or not, they exist, and carry an idea that reaches someone, one day

Clare Archibald

Since selection for Edinburgh Book Festival’s Storyshop in 2014, I have established a multidisciplinary practice, incorporating text, sound, materials and image, often collaborating with writers, artists and musicians or engaging creatively with the public internationally to produce works such as site specific sound installations and text based forest performance. My collaborative album, Birl of Unmap, currently nominated for Scottish Album of the Year was also chosen by the Quietus as one of the 100 essential albums of the year.

My writing has been longlisted for the Lifted Brow/RMIT international experimental non-fiction prize, showcased by the Essay Catalyst project of best Scottish hybrid writers, formed part of the Poettrio translation project and commissioned by literary journals such as Gorse and the Stinging Fly. Moving image, text and audio work has been installed in galleries in the UK and Ireland and I have created commissioned events in car parks and forests for the Not Quite Light Festival, Waltham Forest Borough of Culture and Sanctuary Lab.

I have presented on my practice at a range of academic and public humanities conferences and have a diverse publication record from experimental nonfiction to music interviews and arts features. My work is in several books including Unofficial Britain, Manchester, Something Rich and Strange, From Tarmac to Towpath and The Art of Being Dangerous. I gained a first class postgraduate MSc in experimental filmmaking/media arts in 2020 with an iteration of my writing project The Absolution of Shyness which I will be concluding at Write Toscana.

John McDougall

John McDougall is a writer, photographer and curator based in Renfrewshire, Scotland.

Using visual arts practices as a jumping off point for a variety of political, social and cultural commentary McDougall attempts to bring wide ranging ideas and connect them in a manner which is easy to understand.

Projects have included A Balkan Journey with photographer Chris Leslie in which he uses Leslie’s photography documenting peacetime in former Yugoslavian states to outline similarities between the forces which led to such destruction and the rise of right-wing nationalism around the globe. Similar themes arise in essays for Glasgow photography gallery Street Level Photoworks in which he studies the possibilities for connection made through cultural exchanges and communication to create networks which combat the barriers created by populist attitudes.

As “New Contemporaries” editor for Studies in Photography, John is able to seek out a interesting work by early career photographers working in or connected to Scotland and work with them to develop a critical analysis of what they do and how they do it. This is something he hopes to grow over the coming months by developing a platform which allows new writers to join him in creating new and interesting forms of criticism and analysis of photography and visual art.

At Write Toscana John hopes to find time and space to reflect on a couple of years which have not only changed the world we live in, but also on a deeply personal level. He hopes that by experimenting with some small ideas on speculative fiction he may be able to reconcile a number of nagging theories which currently sit heavily on his mind.

Rachel Elam

Rachel Elam​ is a fiction writer based in Austin, Texas.

Her​ work has been published in New York Magazine, American Writers Review, Las Laguna Gallery, and more. Rachel is an MFA candidate at Bennington Writing Seminars. With over a decade of experience working across the Tech and Nonprofit sectors, Rachel spent eight years at Facebook (Meta), where she led executive communications for Global Business Marketing, helped launch the first Social Impact Brand Partnerships, and guided weekly meditation for global employees.

Rachel started her career in London writing and securing charity grants. During her residency at Write Toscana ​in Italy​, Rachel will be working on her first novel, which delves into the world of three spiritual seekers at different stages in their process of becoming. She is also working on a short fiction collection​, with a range of stories and characters who long to touch the center of the human experience.