Lucy Ribchester

Lucy Ribchester is a novelist and short-story writer based in Edinburgh. She has written three historical crime fiction novels exploring the lives of women in different periods. Her first novel, The Hourglass Factory, was a thriller set during the suffragette movement, weaving details of women working in Edwardian London into a mystery plot. It was longlisted for the Historical Writers Association Debut Crown, picked by Val McDermid for her New Blood panel at Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, and selected by Waterstones’ Edinburgh branches as their Book of the Year. Her second novel, The Amber Shadows, played with tropes of film noir and 1940s spy fiction to explore the lives of women working at Bletchley Park. In 2024 her third historical novel, Murder Ballad, was published, set in eighteenth-century Edinburgh’s music scene and concerning the relationship between a street-ballad singer and a female classical composer. 

She has received a Scottish Book Trust New Writers award, a Robert Louis Stevenson fellowship and a Creative Scotland Open Project award. Her short stories have been widely published in print and online, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. In 2014 she was shortlisted for the Costa Short Story award, and in 2016 for the Manchester Fiction prize. 

Lucy also covers dance, books and children’s events for Scotland’s The List magazine, and writes contemporary thrillers under the name Elle Connel. Her Connel books explore darker subject matter than her historical novels, placing women’s experiences of sex and violence at their core.