Linda Cracknell

Linda Cracknell is a writer of prose and radio drama. Her two collections of short fiction — Life Drawing (NWP, 2000) and The Searching Glance (Salt, 2008) — both featured on award lists. Among her plays for BBC Radio 4 is The Lamp, broadcast in December 2011, which brought together a visiting Kenyan librarian and Scotland’s first public lending library, now preserved as a museum, for an exploration of the liberating power of books and reading. She is the editor of a non-fiction anthology on the wild places of Britain and Ireland, A Wilder Vein (Two Ravens Press, 2009).

Her first novel Call of the Undertow (Freight Books, 2013) is a haunting tale of motherhood, guilt, myth and redemption set on the rugged coast of Caithness at Scotland’s furthest edge. A collection of non-fiction essays on the subject of walking, Doubling Back: ten paths trodden in memory (Freight Books, 2014) was the culmination of a lengthy project initiated when she was the recipient of a Creative Scotland award in 2007.

Linda has tutored many writing courses and workshops including for the Arvon Foundation, and has facilitated creative writing as part of a number of major school projects, from learning about constellations to devising interpretation for a long-distance footpath. She has been writer-in-residence at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children and George Watson’s College, both in Edinburgh. Linda lives in highland Perthshire.