I have a PhD in astronomy and worked at Imperial College for several years. I also have an MLitt in creative writing from 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) where I learnt a little bit about genetics and wrote lots about it. 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 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 complex 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, Bradford Literary Festival and Edinburgh International Science Festival. And I’m the non-fiction editor of Scotland’s brightest and best SF magazine Shoreline of Infinity.
Recently I’ve been writing essays about science and history – for example ‘Alternative Geometries‘ about the cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the physicist Lise Meitner and my grandmother Lisl. My latest project is ‘The German Lesson’; a non-fiction book about my life in Frankfurt as a new German citizen combined with an exploration of the life of my German-Jewish grandfather Ernst, a man whose experiences of fighting for Germany in the First World War and for Britain in the Second World War stands as an example of how some of us must change our identities in order to survive. The book also contrasts what we know of the early Universe, and how we confidently gain that knowledge, with the ease with which recent family history can evaporate, forgotten. My blogs also explore this.