I have a PhD in astronomy and worked as a research fellow at Imperial College for several years. I also have an MLitt in creative writing from the University of Glasgow and I was a winner of a Scottish Book Trust/Creative Scotland New Writers Award for 2012. In 2016 I was a recipient of a Suffrage Science award; set up to honour women in science.
I really enjoy being a writer-in-residence, my first residency was at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum (based at the University of Edinburgh). During 2015 I was a writer-in-residence on the fiction meets science programme at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in Germany, and at the beginning of 2018 I had a residency near Heidelberg, thanks to UNESCO City of Literature Heidelberg and the Kulturstiftung Rhein-Neckar-Kreis e.V. I’m also a Hawthornden Fellow.
I’m an Honorary Fellow at the Science, Technology and Innovation Studies (STIS) unit in the University of Edinburgh, where I’ve worked for many years as an informal writer-in-residence and been involved in a variety of interdisciplinary projects.
One of these projects was about the concept of Freud’s uncanny. I helped initiate, manage and edit an anthology of work by authors and academics inspired by the uncanny; ‘Uncanny Bodies’ was published in 2020 after a two-day creative workshop for the contributors. One of the purposes of this workshop was to encourage academics to write in different styles and modes, and to consider how creative writing may give them opportunities to express themselves and explore their research.
In 2015 I co-produced an anthology of work inspired by Einstein’s general theory of relativity; ‘I Am Because You Are’ (published by Freight Books). Similarly to ‘Uncanny Bodies’ I initiated this project that brought together authors and academics, and managed both the creative and also the practical aspects.
I write occasional academic papers on the processes of working on these sorts of projects (such as this one in Leonardo).
I like talking about the links between science and literature on the radio and at live events; I’ve been on Radio 4 and Radio Scotland a few times and have appeared at many festivals, most recently at Heidelberg Literaturtage, Leipzig Buchmesse and Worldcon 2024. And I’m the non-fiction editor of Scotland’s brightest and best SF magazine Shoreline of Infinity.