Charlie Hill

Charlie Hill is a writer of novels, short stories and memoir, whose work employs a variety of formal approaches. His first book, The Space Between Things (Indigo Dreams Press, 2010) was a coming-of-age novel set against the backdrop of the Century of the Self, the road protest movement and the Balkan wars of the mid 1990’s. This was followed by a satirical farce about arts and literature called Books! (Profile Books, 2013) and an essentially plotless novella, Stuff (Cinnamon Press, 2016), which reflected his then preoccupation with mid-20th century Existentialism. A fragmentary memoir – I Don’t Want to go to the Taj Mahal (Repeater Books, 2020) – was next, and he has also written an historical novel about the Irish pirate Gráinne Ni Mhaille, and a modernist collection of short stories.

After leaving school at 16, Charlie Hill didn’t return to education until he took an MA in Creative Writing at University of Birmingham in 2016. It was his experiences in-between – of low-waged jobs, periods out-of-work and social deprivation – that inspired him to set-up a community literary festival, which ran from 2011 to 2017, and to volunteer as a writer-in-residence at an inner-city cafe; since then he has delivered seminars on the short story scene and taught experimental writing for The Arvon Foundation. In 2022, he organised an event with Jim Crace in aid of Crisis.

Charlie Hill lives in south Birmingham. He spent six years as a full-time father and is happiest walking in hills or playing cards with his family.