Tiffany Murray is a novelist and screenwriter. She specialised in post-colonial literature at New York University and critical and creative writing at the University of East Anglia, where she gained her doctorate and taught. Her first novel, Happy Accidents, is the coming-of-age tale of eleven-year-old Kate Happy and has drawn comparison with Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm. Her second novel, Diamond Star Halo, tells the story of Halo Llewelyn and her unconventional family who run a recording studio in rural Wales: a story of first love and rock ’n’ roll, it drew comparisons with Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. Both novels were shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize. Her third novel, Sugar Hall, is set on the Welsh border. It explores the inheritance of slavery in a post-war rural landscape and was listed as one of David Mitchell’s 6 favorite ghost stories in the Week.
Tiffany has been a Hay Festival fiction fellow and a Fulbright scholar. She was a senior lecturer for over ten years and has edited various anthologies, from Pretext to Bronte Tales to Fill Your Heart: writers on Bowie. Tiffany regularly works on development projects for young writers and loves teaching adult and school fiction weeks for Arvon and Ty Newydd. She is currently working on a memoir, The Rock ’n’ Roll Cook and is adapting Diamond Star Halo as a feature. She continues academic research in the areas of Caribbean literature, women’s studies and creative writing.
