Spring Residency Programme 2026

Suzy Aspley

Suzy Aspley is a crime fiction writer based in central Scotland. Her first gothic thriller Crow Moon began life during a writing retreat at Moniack Mhor in 2018. She is a former winner of Bloody Scotland’s Pitch Perfect competition and her debut was shortlisted for numerous prizes including the Bloody Scotland and McDermid Debut prizes in 2024. Her second novel in the Martha Strangeways series The Bone Mother, will be published in May by Orenda Books.

Krystelle Bamford

Krystelle Bamford’s work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, bath magg, and a number of anthologies including the Best New British and Irish Poets 2019–2021 (Eyewear). She is a 2019 Primers (Nine Arches Press) poet and was awarded a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. Idle Grounds, her first novel, was published by Hutchinson Heinemann (UK) and Scribner (US) in 2025, and was shortlisted for Scotland’s National Book Award, and is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Born in France and raised in the US, she now lives in Edinburgh with her partner and two kids. 

Anahit Behrooz

Anahit Behrooz is a writer, editor and critic based in Edinburgh. She is the author of BFFs: The Radical Potential of Female Friendship and works as Books Editor and Events Editor at The Skinny. Her writing has appeared in i-D, AnOther Magazine, Little White Lies, and gal-dem among others.

Victoria Bennett

Victoria Bennett is a disabled, award-winning writer, poet, and literary activist whose work centres on nature, identity, and creative resilience. Her debut memoir, All My Wild Mothers, won the Nautilus Award for Memoir, was shortlisted for multiple UK prizes, and was named an Aladin Best Book of the 21st Century.

Her forthcoming book, The Apothecary by the Sea: A Year in an Orkney Garden, will be published by Elliott & Thompson in April 2026. The book blends memoir, herbal knowledge and wild gardening wisdom, exploring belonging and change at the edge of land and sea.

She is currently working on RUST: A Personal History of Iron, an ecofeminist narrative non-fiction work tracing iron through bodies, landscapes, and industrial inheritance. Shortlisted for the World of Books Sustainable Stories Awards 2025 and supported through Creative Scotland’s Open Individuals Fund, RUST was recently selected for the Hugo Burge Foundation Creative Individuals Awards.

She lives in Orkney with her family, and is represented by Caro Clarke at Portobello Literary.

Linda Cracknell

Place, memory and motion are at the heart of Linda Cracknell’s writing. A great walker, as reflected in her 2024 book, Doubling Back: Paths trodden in memory, she also excavates history and myth in fiction with Caithness-set Call of the Undertow and The Other Side of Stone which focuses across time on a Perthshire woollen mill. Her latest book, Sea Marked: Throwing a Line to a Coastal Past is a memoir exploring her seafaring ancestry in north Devon. She lives in Highland Perthshire and teaches creative writing widely.

Emma Grae

Emma Grae is a Scots language author and journalist from Glasgow. She is currently in the process of editing her third novel, Cathy get yer Dancin Shoes Oan, and hopes to write her third children’s book, The Puddock Wioot A Pond, in early 2026.  

She was named on the Saltire Society’s 40 Under 40 list for her work in the languages category in 2023. Her debut novel, Be Guid tae yer Mammy, won Scots Book of the Year 2022 and was shortlisted for Scottish Fiction Book of the Year the same year.  

Her work explores themes of social isolation, rebellion, the ongoing stigma surrounding mental illness and what it means to be a Scots speaker today. She is inspired by history, the natural world, and the people she has met throughout her life.  

She has written about the Scots language for the National since 2021.

Sally Huband

Sally Huband is a writer and visual artist and her first book, Sea Bean, was awarded the Highland Book Prize, 2023. She is a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Awardee for narrative non-fiction (2017) and is currently researching a book on sound, supported by a Creative Scotland grant. Sally has contributed to several anthologies including Moving Mountains, Antlers of Water and Archipelago, and recently collaborated with Polly Atkin for the Book of Bogs (Little Toller Books, 2025). With GAADA, an artist led social enterprise, Sally has produced two hybrid publications including saltwaterislands&. She lives in Shetland.

Lynsey May

Lynsey May is an Edinburgh writer whose debut novel, Weak Teeth, was published in 2023 and chosen as Waterstones Scottish Book of the Month for May 2024. Her new novel, Kin, is slated for publication early 2027. She’s won prizes and fellowships and was selected as one of “10 Rising Stars of UK Writing” as part of ILX 10, an international Lit Exchange programme from the National Centre of Writing, in 2024. She’s never far from a cup of coffee and her bag is always too heavy.

Lucie McKnight Hardy

Lucie McKnight Hardy (she/her) is the author of Water Shall Refuse Them (2019) which was shortlisted for the Mslexia Novel Competition and longlisted for the Caledonia Novel Award. She is also the author of a collection of short stories, Dead Relatives (2021), of which The Guardian said, ‘This short story collection confirms the author’s reputation in the field of literary horror.’ Her stories have featured in a variety of publications, including Best British Short Stories 2019, The Lonely Crowd, Uncertainties IV, The New Abject, Black Static and as a limited edition chapbook from Nightjar Press. Her next novel, Night Babies, will be published in the UK by John Murray in April 2026.

Niall Moorjani

Niall Moorjani is an award winning and critically acclaimed Scottish-Indian, non-binary and neurodiverse writer, storyteller and theatre maker based between Edinburgh and London. They have perfomed all over the world, from Delhi to New York to old York. They create for both children and adults, dealing with themes queerness, anti-colonialism, myth and legend. At the core of all their work is hope, joy and kindness. Their work has been published in multiple places, but most notably with Bloombury/ Methuen Drama, Kanpur:1857 (2025), and Lantana, Rajiv’s Starry Feelings (2023).

Heather Palmer

Heather Palmer is the author of the Eynhallow Saga, an Audible Original series. Their first novel, Deathbound, was released by Audible in 2025 and followed by Bloodbound in 2026. 

Based in Fife, they are a Scottish writer with a passion for exploring nature and the stories of the long-dead or undying. She loves writing queer romance, unpicking the status quo and making people laugh. In 2019 they won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers’ Award – the first writer ever to win with a comics script. In 2020, she successfully funded a Kickstarter for a self-published graphic novel, SMITHERS&WING, in collaboration with artist Kirsty Hunter.  

Beyond writing, Heather has worked for some of Scotland’s favourite literary events, including Cymera Festival, StAnza Poetry Festival and Scotland’s National Book Awards.

Chris Powici

Chris Powici lives in Perthshire, Scotland where he writes poems and nonfiction. He has taught creative writing at The University of Stirling and The Open University, and is co-editor of New Writing Scotland. He edited Northwords Now from 2010-2017 and is one of the people behind Paperboats (paperboats.org), a group of writers campaigning for action on climate change and other ecological threats. His most recent poetry collection is Look, Breathe (Red Squirrel Press). A new collection, Dint, is due from Red Squirrel in June 2026.

Claire Schultz

Claire Schultz holds a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Chicago and an MPhil in Children’s Literature from the University of Cambridge. A central New Jersey native, she moved to Scotland to pursue a PhD in childhood writing. Her short fiction has been featured in literary journals including Coffin Bell, Crow & Cross Keys, and more, and has won the Hotel Commonwealth Emerging Writers Prize. She works primarily in the overlap of fantasy, horror, and literary fiction, and her debut adult novel, Even Your Bones Would Do, will be published by Berkley Books & Daphne Press in early 2027. As Claire Rose, her debut Young Adult novel, The Cove, will be published by Wednesday Books in May 2026. She lives in Edinburgh with her haunted cats.

Akshi Singh

Akshi Singh is a writer and psychoanalyst. Born in India, she lives in Glasgow. Akshi is the author of In Defence of Leisure: Experiments in Living with Marion Milner (Jonathan Cape, 2025). She works across genres, writing memoir, criticism, fiction, and poetry. Her writing on psychoanalysis, art, and politics has appeared in Granta, Parapraxis, The London Review of Books, Art Review and elsewhere.  

She has a PhD in literature from the University of London. She was previously a Wellcome Trust funded postdoctoral fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, and Lecturer in Global Migrations at the University of Glasgow. She is Associate Editor at Parapraxis magazine and Deputy Editor at Critical Quarterly.

Angie Spoto

Angie Spoto is an American fiction writer living in Edinburgh. In 2020, she completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. Her debut novel The Grief Nurse was shortlisted for the First Novel Prize and The Bridge Awards Emerging Writer Award. Her second novel The Bone Diver was longlisted for The Saltires: Scotland’s National Book Awards. Angie loves stories that are dark and surreal, strange and magical, and is inspired by writers like Ursula Le Guinn, Octavia Butler, Leonora Carrington, and Naomi Novik. She loves fairy tales, especially Scottish ones. She lives beside the shore with her husband and son.

Rafael Torrubia

Rafael Torrubia is the author of The Shipwright and the Shroudweaver, the first novel in an epic fantasy series from Gollancz. They have won a number of awards for their writing and poetry, including Writer of the Year from the National Gallery of Scotland, the Deirdre Roberts Poetry Prize and multiple shortlistings for the Bridport Prize. Their previous prose and poetry work rests with Bloomsbury, the National Gallery of Scotland, Jupiter Artland and Sword & Kettle press. An Italian translation of The Shipwright and the Shroudweaver is forthcoming from Ne/oN Libri. Like all recovering historians, they have also worked in wine, whisky and at the National Museum of Scotland. Rafael is currently Lead Reader with the writing charity Open Book, delivering creative writing workshops across Scotland. When not writing, they can be found lost in a peaty whisky, a muddy allotment, or by a wide, dark river somewhere in Perthshire.

Katalina Watt

Katalina Watt is the author of Saltswept (2026, Hodderscape). They were selected for a 2025 Literature Matters Award from Royal Society of Literature, and AIR Literature UNESCO 2024 Writer in Residence for Konstkollektivet in Sweden. They were a finalist for 2023 Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine as founding Audio Director for khōréō. They are a Writing Coach at The Novelry and represented by Christabel McKinley at David Higham Associates.