Granite Noir 2024: Unsettling, Unnerving, Sublime

Granite Noir 2024: Unsettling, Unnerving, Sublime

Chaired by Eris Young

Three writers whose books leave you with that brilliant creeped out feeling only a great book can create!

As a child, David could tell something was wrong. Blending horror and literary fiction, Mothtown is the strange new novel from celebrated author Caroline Hardaker.

Weak Teeth by Lynsey May is a wonderfully astute portrait of a messed-up family – Ellis’s world spins out of control. She’s dogged by toothache and somehow she’s found herself stalking her ex’s new lover.

Camilla Grudova’s latest collection The Coiled Serpent gathers surreal and absurd stories and we wonder if they’re actually very far from our own realities at all.

Caroline Hardaker

Caroline Hardaker is a poet and novelist from the northeast of England. Caroline’s debut, Composite Creatures, was short-listed for the Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award, and was chosen by Silvia Moreno-Garcia as one of the Best Books of 2021 for The Washington Post. She has published two collections of poetry, and her work has appeared worldwide in print and on BBC radio. She lives and writes in Newcastle.

Lynsey May

Lynsey May lives, loves and writes in Edinburgh. She won first place in the Fresh Ink novel contest in 2020, a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2013, a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2015 and a spot as Cove Park’s Emerging Scottish Writer in 2016. Her short fiction has been published in various journals and anthologies, including The Stinging Fly, Gutter, New Writing Scotland and Banshee. Weak Teeth is her first novel.

Camilla Grudova

Camilla Grudova lives in Edinburgh where she works as a cinema operator and waitress. Her fiction has appeared in The White Review and Granta. She is the critically acclaimed author of The Doll’s Alphabet (2017) and the Women’s Prize for Fiction-longlisted Children of Paradise (2022). She was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2023.

Eris Young

Eris Young is a queer, transgender writer of speculative fiction. Their work has appeared in magazines including Escape Pod, Shoreline of Infinity and Fusion Fragment, as well as anthologies such as Uncanny Bodies from Luna Press Publishing. Their alien contact story All That Water came first in the 2021 British Fantasy Society short story competition. They are the writer in residence at Lighthouse Bookshop.