Andrea McNicoll

I was born in 1964 and grew up in Ayrshire and Glasgow. I studied English Literature at Aberdeen University then went travelling through Asia, working at odd jobs along the way. I settled in a small town in northern Thailand, where I married and ran a restaurant for 9 years. I then moved to the city of Chiang Mai to work as an interpreter/translator for a few years before returning to the UK in 2001 to study for a Masters in Southeast Asian Studies at Hull University, followed by an MPhil in Creative Writing at Glasgow University. I’d already written the first chapter of my book, ‘Moonshine in the Morning’, when I began the creative writing course. With the encouragement of my tutor and a New Writer’s Bursary from the Scottish Arts Council I went on to finish what became a novel of interconnected narratives set in a small Thai village. I suffered almost two years of the usual rejections from agents and publishers until one day an email arrived from the novelist and poet Mike Stocks, who had stumbled across an extract of my novel in an anthology and loved it. Mike read the whole book and helped me submit it to Alma Books. Moonshine in the Morning’ was published in August 2008. It was shortlisted for the 2008 Saltire First Book Award and went on to win the 2009 Scottish Arts Council SMIT First Book Award. For the past few years I have been working in Glasgow in the field of mental health and disability. In the late summer of 2010 I was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. In autumn 2010 I embarked on a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of the West of Scotland, where I am working on a project that explores the boundaries between fact and fiction. Other writing projects include a novel set in Glasgow and a sequel to 'Moonshine in the Morning' set in Chiang Mai. In June 2011 I was a tutor with the Arvon Foundation at Moniack Mhor.