Essay April 2024
On Writing Slowly, and Why the Novel Resists Urgency
The tyranny of productivity culture has not spared writers. Here is an argument for time as material, not obstacle.
Published in Granta
Between Novels
The smaller rooms of a writing life.
Essays on place, memory, and the practice of paying attention. Short fiction published in literary magazines and journals since 2015. Writing that does not fit inside a novel tends to find its way here.
All Writing
Essays &
Short Fiction
Selected work published in literary journals and magazines.
Short Fiction November 2023
The Woman Who Kept All Her Windows Clean
A story about a retired schoolteacher, a view of the Firth of Forth, and the particular loneliness of being seen.
Published in The White Review
Essay June 2023
Edinburgh in November: Notes on Atmosphere as Subject
What the city offers when it turns its face away. A meditation on weather, light, and the places that write us back.
Published in The Paris Review
Short Fiction February 2022
Forty Seconds at the Corner of Leith Walk
The story of a near-collision and the life that flashes through a stranger's face.
Published in Ploughshares
Essay September 2021
Silence in Rooms: On What Fiction Leaves Out
The things a novel refuses to say � and why that refusal is so often its truest gesture.
Published in The Dublin Review
Short Fiction March 2020
Harbour Light
A lighthouse keeper's assistant and the woman who brings the post. A story about the particular weight of waiting.
Published in The Stinging Fly
Essay October 2019
A Borrowed Country: On Writing Scotland as an Outsider
What it means to set fiction in a place that is not quite yours � and whether that is ever a problem.
Published in Edinburgh Review
Short Fiction May 2018
The Last House on the Street Before It Ends
A woman sorts through her father's belongings and finds, among them, evidence of a life she never knew he had.
Published in Granta
“She has mastered the art of writing about very small things — a hand gesture, a word misheard across a room — and making them feel like the whole weight of a life.”
— The Times Literary Supplement