I’m a published fiction writer. My stories have appeared in The London Magazine, La Piccioletta Barca, Scoundrel Time, Lunate, Litro, The Cardiff Review, Bandit, Storgy and Scratch Books.
I've been shortlisted for the:
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Kate O'Riordan Prize for Short Fiction 2026
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Brick Lane Short Story Prize 2023
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London Independent Story Prize 2023
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Bristol Short Story Prize 2022
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Brick Lane Short Story Prize 2021
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Fish Short Story Prize 2021
I’ve always been preoccupied with great stories. My earliest memories, aged four or five, are of sitting astride a wooden toy train listening to my father tell stories that placed me at the very centre of a narrative. He would weave tales where I was a train driver or an astronaut and, since then, and throughout my life, I’ve been hooked on great and engaging stories, well told.
My short stories and novels explore broken relationships, fucked up families, damaged men and messy women, and all the chaos that they leave in their wake. I’m drawn to darkness and melancholia but I’m hopeful too, about our individual and collective potential for redemption. Let’s call it optimistic melancholy.
My favourite novels are those that channel the experiences of a young child as witness to tragedy. I’m thinking of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend, Michael Frayn’s Spies. Books about children, but definitely not for children. Recent literary highlights have been My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley, Send Nudes by Saba Sams, Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead, Damon Galgut’s The Promise, and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottesa Moshfegh. I’m also a fan of writing about the landscape - Robert Macfarlane, Nan Shepherd, and Roger Deakin. I find inspiration in the John Muir quote: “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”
Every couple of years I read The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway to remind me how effortless great writing can seem.
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Novels
The Winter Son will be published in March 2027.
It’s 1980. A young family are pursuing their dream of living in a remote Cornish valley. Somewhere to hide from the threats and horrors of the modern world – a changing climate, nuclear war, acid rain, disease.
When tragedy strikes, the dream becomes
a waking nightmare – a journey into the darkness of solitude and grief, and the possibility of hope that sustains us when all else seems lost.
The Winter Son is about love, endurance, childhood fantasy and the first hints of adolescence. It goes to the heart of our fears, both justified and imagined, and the damage that fear can do. Throughout it explores our deepest connections to nature, our
conflicting desires for solitude and social connection, and the harsh realities of a simple rural existence in a pre-digital age.
"An immediate and claustrophobic hyper-real fever dream of a novel, grounded in a reality that both appeals and appals." GILLIAN STERN
