Scottish Writers’ Centre: In Process with Zoë Strachan

Listed as one of the top 20 novelists under 30 by The Independent on Sunday in 2003 and as one of the new generation of five young Scottish authors in 2011 by the Scottish Review of Books, Zoë Strachan will talk about her work and give us an insight into her writing process and inspirations.

Zoë is the author of three novels: Ever Fallen in Love (Sandstone Press, July 2011), Spin Cycle and Negative Space (Picador). Ever Fallen in Love was short-listed for the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards and the Green Carnation Prize, and nominated for the London Book Awards. Negative Space won a Betty Trask Award and was short-listed for the Saltire First Book of the Year Award.

She has been UNESCO City of Literature writer-in-residence at the National Museum of Scotland, a Hermann Kesten Stipendiaten, a Hawthornden Fellow and a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellow. In 2011 she undertook a British Council visiting fellowship at the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa and she was visiting faculty at Dartmouth College in 2012. Zoë also works for theatre include Panic Patterns (with Louise Welsh, Citizen’s Theatre and BBC Radio Scotland) and Old Girls (which opened the 2009/10 season of A Play, a Pie and a Pint at Oran Mor in Glasgow). Her short opera, Sublimation (with composer Nick Fells), toured Scotland in May 2010 with Scottish Opera before going to Cape Town, South Africa in November 2010. The Lady from the Sea, a full-length opera composed by Craig Armstrong and based on the play by Ibsen, premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2012, where it won a Herald Angel Award. She is on the Board of Directors of Glasgow Women’s Library, a Patron of the Imprint Festival in East Ayrshire, and a supporter of Scottish PEN.