Carol McKay

Newly published - my poetry pamphlet READING THE LANDSCAPE. These are poems about ancestry and addiction, about landscape and introspection, about walking in the natural world and reflecting on our own inner mindscapes. Published by Hedgehog Press after I won their White Label Quatre competition.

Want a feelgood read about life after a pandemic? INCUNABULUM is it. I promise you - the characters face their share of scary fights and ordeals, but this is a positive book, fast paced and with a happy ending, and isn't that exactly what we want right now? Incunabulum is epic storytelling about new life. Try it! And let me know what you think of it.

Leela Soma interviewed me about it for her blog, and you can read it here - https://leelasoma.wordpress.com/2020/04/19/author-interview/

My fiction is informed by people and places. Many of my stories stem from experiences within my hometown but I often find myself inspired by places I've visited. Sometimes my work is classified as urban realism; sometimes it asks the reader to grapple with the misfit in us all.

My short stories have been finding publication for twenty years since I took a Masters degree in Creative Writing at the Universities of Strathclyde and Glasgow. I'm very happy to have some of the early ones made available together in an e-book called 'Ordinary Domestic' published in March 2012 by The PotHole Press.

Also available on Amazon, in e-book format and good old fashioned ink and paper, is 'As I lay me down to sleep' which is the first volume of Eileen Munro's autobiography. I co-wrote this book with Eileen after meeting her when she was a student on one of the Open University creative writing modules which I taught between 2004 to 2018.

In 2010, I was diagnosed with a health condition called Addison's disease. It's an auto-immune condition in which the body attacks and destroys the outer layers of the adrenal glands. It's a fairly rare condition, so I got in touch with fifteen other Addison's people to produce an inspirational book on the subject. We've all written about our experience of what it's like to live with this life-changing condition, and this is now available on Kindle in the e-book called 'Second Chances: true stories of living with Addison's disease'.

Also available for Kindle - my e-book of Creative Writing Prompts to Feed the Imagination. I wrote this to answer the question I get asked most often, i.e. 'Where do you find ideas? I'd love to write but can't think of anything to write about.' This little guide gives lots of stimulating ideas for fiction, poetry and memoir writing and it also includes some straightforward advice on plotting and point of view.

My website is at https://www.carolmckay.co.uk