Lucy Ellmann
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Fellow at Queen Margaret University, 2005-07
Fellow at University of Dundee, 2011/12
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Lucy Ellmann grew up in a household in which she never got a word in edgeways. She sees writing as a reversal of muteness, abbreviation, abnegation and annihilation. It's WAR!
Her first novel, Sweet Desserts, was a vaguely autobiographical experiment in offending her entire family. The next, Varying Degrees of Hopelessness, was a satire of Barbara Cartland and art history. Man or Mango? was her only real love story, and concerns a reclusive and misanthropic Englishwoman in love with an American poet who's too busy writing about ice hockey to notice her. The next, Dot in the Universe, is a trot through the meaninglessness of existence, interrupted by the brief reincarnation of the heroine as a possum. Her latest, Doctors and Nurses (February 2006), is a protest against the medical profession - her rawest book yet and, she thinks, pretty funny.
The writers she admires range from Jane Austen, Sterne, Rabelais and Dickens to Joyce, Beckett, Molly Keane, Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek. What she hates are money-grubbing bestsellers about shopping, autism, salt, cod, salt-cod, merecenaries, spy stuff, pharmaceutical companies, and murder. She also resents the author cult, the publicity circus and people who tell you to write a bestseller. This is like telling you to marry someone rich. It's utterly corrupt and besmirches the craft of writing - an otherwise naughty, nasty, and occasionally noble enterprise.
