Michael Amherst

Michael Amherst is the author of novel The Boyhood of Cain, as well as book-length essay, Go the Way Your Blood Beats, a meditation on truth and desire, won the 2019 Stonewall Israel Fishman Award for Nonfiction (sponsored by the American Library Association).

His short fiction has been longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Prize and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, among others. He is also the winner of the 2020 Hubert Butler Essay Prize and was shortlisted for the 2021 Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts. His essay, ‘Does a Silhouette Have a Shadow?’, examining the relationship between mind and body through the lens of chronic illness, is published in anthology On Bodies. His work has also been published in the Guardian, New Statesman, the Spectator, The White Review and Contrappasso magazine.