The Team

About Helen McClory

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Helen McClory is an award-winning writer raised between Edinburgh and the Isle of Skye, specialising primarily in flash fiction, hybrid pieces, short stories and novels.

In 2010 she received a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow. In 2015 her debut fiction collection, On the Edges of Vision, won the Saltire Society First Book of the Year Award. A novel, Flesh of the Peach, followed in 2017. Her second collection Mayhem & Death was published in 2018, along with The Goldblum Variations, a book of microfictions on Jeff Goldblum. Her fiction, poetry and essays have been widely published in places such as Refinery29, Gulf Coast, the Denver Quarterly, Gorse, The Toast and 3:AM Magazine, while she has been interviewed in The Times, The Herald and The Skinny, among other places. She has appeared at AyeWrite and the Edinburgh International Book Festival. The Herald described her as “Clearly one of the best new writers to have emerged in Scotland in the last few years.” Margaret Atwood called her stories “Shiny dark liquorice mind candy: nothing quite like them”.

The recipient of funded residencies at The Banff Centre Canada and Kaaysa, Brazil, Helen is interested in literary explorations of place, identity, gender and form. Experimentation and playfulness characterise her approach to creative writing, both as a practitioner and a teacher. She also crowd-funded and organised a book tour around the eastern US for her first book, and is committed to a DIY approach to the writing life. She works as a mentor for London-based writing organisation The RiffRaff. She is represented by Jenny Brown of the Jenny Brown Agency.

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Professional Review with Camilla Grudova

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Camilla is the Canadian-born, Scotland-based author of the acclaimed The Doll's Alphabet, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, and Children of Paradise, published by Atlantic Books.

Camilla is a powerhouse of talent, longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction for Children of Paradise in 2023, and landing a place on the coveted Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists list and the longlist for the Dylan Thomas Prize in quick succession.

Review snips:

One of Britain's best young short story writers... eerie... festers in glorious style... there's nothing vanilla in the dark of the Paradise, and even when the corporate takeover comes, complete with managerial drone, it all feels smooth and unearthly - an allegory for lost stories, youth and time. ― The Telegraph

Camilla Grudova is Angela Carter's natural inheritor. Her style is effortlessly spare and wonderfully seductive. Read her! Love her! She is sincerely strange - a glittering literary gem in a landscape awash with paste and glue and artificial settings ― Nicola Barker, author of Darkmans

What commends Children of Paradise... is the deft hand of an auteur at work. ― Financial Times

A remarkable and memorable achievement. To combine the gothic, the carnivalesque, the ghastly and the sublime in a relatively slender novel shows considerable talent indeed. ― Scotland on Sunday

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