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 about the exploration of outer space, upland hill farming, and the uncanny. 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.