Cherise Saywell

Cherise Saywell is a novelist and short-story writer. She was born and brought up in Australia and has lived in Scotland since 1996. Her first novel, Desert Fish, was written with the help of a Scottish Arts Council bursary and was published by Vintage in 2011. Twitcher, her second novel, was published in 2013. Cherise’s short stories have appeared in the London Magazine and New Writing Scotland, as well as in anthologies including Waving at the Gardener (Bloomsbury, 2009) and Salt New Writing (Salt, 2013).

Cherise won the V.S. Pritchett memorial prize in 2003, and was a runner-up in the Asham award in 2009 and the Salt prize for a short story in 2012. Before writing fiction, Cherise read English and cultural studies at the University of Queensland in Brisbane and spent eight years employed as an academic researcher both in Australia and Scotland. She has also worked in television production and sports publishing. She lives in Edinburgh with her partner and their two children and is working on her third novel.

Cherise Saywell is a novelist and short-story writer. She was the RLF Writing Fellow at Stirling University from 2014 to 2016 and is now at Strathclyde University, where she offers individual consultations with students who want to improve their academic writing. As an RLF Consultant Fellow, Cherise facilitates writing workshops for postgraduates in universities around Scotland. She has been working as part of the Bridge team since 2016 and has run the programme at numerous schools around Edinburgh, including Broughton, Drummond, James Gillespie’s, St Augustine’s, Forrester, Portobello and Edinburgh Academy. She has also been involved with RLF contributions to the LEAPS summer schools and personal statement days. Her sessions are tailored to help students of all abilities.