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50 word bio: Kirsty Logan is an author of novels, short stories, chapbooks and collaborative projects with musicians and illustrators. Her most recent books are the novel Now She is Witch and the memoir The Unfamiliar. She lives in Glasgow with her family, where she is working on film and TV projects.
150 word bio: Kirsty Logan’s latest books are the novel Now She is Witch and The Unfamiliar: A Queer Motherhood Memoir. Her next book will be a short story collection, No & Other Love Stories, due out on Valentine’s Day 2025. She is the author of three novels, three story collections, two chapbooks, a 10-hour audio play for Audible, several collaborative projects with musicians and visual artists, and around 300 short stories. Her books have won the Lambda, Polari, Saboteur, Scott and Gavin Wallace awards. Her work has been optioned for TV, developed for film, adapted for stage, recorded for radio and podcasts, exhibited in galleries and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine. She is currently collaborating on several projects across film, TV, collaborative chapbooks, and performance.
Extremely comprehensive bio: Kirsty Logan is a professional daydreamer. Her published work spans novels, short stories, audio and radio work, memoir, poetry and collaborative work with musicians, artists and performers.
Her first story collection, The Rental Heart & Other Fairytales (Salt, 2014), won the Scott Prize, the Polari First Book Prize, and the Saboteur Award. Her first novel, The Gracekeepers (Harvill Secker, 2015), won a Lambda Literary Award and was selected for the Radio 2 Book Club and the Waterstones Book Club. A Portable Shelter (Vintage, 2015) won the Gavin Wallace Fellowship. Things We Say in the Dark (Harvill Secker, 2019), a collection of feminist horror stories, was optioned for TV. Her most recent novel, Now She is Witch (Harvill Secker, 2023) received rave reviews and was launched at a series of sold-out events.
Her short fiction and poetry has been translated into Catalan, Japanese, Spanish, Italian and Chinese, adapted for stage, recorded for radio and podcasts, exhibited in galleries, and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine. She regularly appears on BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and BBC Scotland to discuss her work and review the latest books, films and TV shows. She appeared with Neil Gaiman, Gavin Francis and Harry Josephine Giles on Damian Barr’s TV show, The Big Scottish Book Club.
With Heather Parry, she co-hosted Teenage Scream podcast, revisiting the best (and worst) of 90s teen horror including Point Horror, R.L. Stine, and every late 90s/early 2000s horror film you remember (and some you don’t). The podcast ran for 5 years and over 100 episodes.
Her collaborative work includes ‘The Knife-Thrower’s Wife’, a series of songs inspired by Angela Carter, commissioned by the British Library and co-written with Kathryn Williams and Polly Paulusma. She is part of performance collective New Myths with songmaker Kirsty Law and harpist Esther Swift. Their first show, ‘Lord Fox’, a retelling of an old English fairytale in song, spoken word and harp music, was commissioned by the Edinburgh International Book Festival and performed at the opening night ceremony of the Georgetown Literary Festival in Malaysia. Their second show, ‘The Pulling of the Rose’, is a modern reimagining of the folk song Tam Lin, commissioned by the Scottish Storytelling Centre and performed at a 5-night show at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Their third show, ‘The Public Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’, was commissioned by and performed at the 2014 Edinburgh International Book Festival with a live choir and custom digital video installation.
She also makes collaborative work with visual artists, beginning with the chapbook ‘The House of Former Lovers’ with illustrator Maria Stoian, consisting of six stories of women becoming animals or taking animal lovers. Next came ‘Close Your Eyes and Come With Me’ with woodcut artist Blockforest. Her stories and poems have also been illustrated by Abigail Larson in Red Penny Papers and Arthur Asa in F(r)iction.
She has narrated the audiobooks for all three of her novels – The Gracekeepers, The Gloaming, and Now She is Witch – as well as her memoir, The Unfamiliar. She also wrote and narrated a 10-episode series for BBC Radio 4, ‘A History of Ghosts’. She wrote a 10-hour audio drama for Audible, ‘The Sound at the End’, recorded with a full cast and music.
Her books have received blurbs from Ursula Le Guin (“Highly original…haunting and mysterious”), Roxane Gay (“Kirsty Logan is an exquisite writer who possesses the uncanny ability to make even the most mundane detail beautifully compelling. If you want to be captivated, if you want to be utterly taken, reach for this book and don’t let go.”), Camilla Grudova (“darkly graceful, innovative, sexy and funny”), Heather Parry (“A dark delight, steeped in blood red honey”) and Anna Bogutskaya (“No one writes about the horrific and the erotic, and the tangled up intersections of both, like Kirsty Logan”). She was selected by Val McDermid as one of the ten most exciting LGBTQI+ writers working today, and also travelled to Hamburg at the invitation of Louise Welsh to represent Scottish writing as part of the British Council Literature Seminar in Germany.
She is a Hawthornden and Brownsbank Fellow, and has been writer in residence for Granada City of Literature in Spain. She has performed her work at festivals and events all over the world, including Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Malaysia, Spain, and all over the UK.
She has taught creative writing for the universities of London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Stirling, Aberdeen, York, Dundee, Lancaster and Northumbria; and other organisations including Arvon, Moniack Mhor, Curtis Brown Creative, Writers & Artists, Faber Academy, The Novelry, The Reader Berlin and Write Like a Grrrl. Her teaching has covered wide-ranging subjects including writing short stories, writing genre (fantasy, magical realism, horror), writing memoir, structure, voice, ekphrastic writing, and editing your own work.
As well as writing fiction, Kirsty also reviews books and works as a writing mentor.
She is currently working on two new books, a short story collection due to be published on Valentine’s Day 2025, and a very long novel not due to be published any time soon. She is currently collaborating on several projects: a TV show for NBC directed by Amy Neil, a horror film for Lemming Film with Shariff Korver, an illustrated chapbook with Eleanor Crewes, a horror musical with Marc Teitler, and an epistolary story with Sarah Maria Griffin.