Lesley McDowell

I am a novelist and writer of non-fiction based in Glasgow. I was a lecturer in English Literature at St Andrews University from 1995-97, then became a full-time freelance literary critic, writing for publications like The Herald, The Scotsman, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and others. My first novel, The Picnic, was published by Black and White in 2007, and my second – Unfashioned Creatures - about Mary Shelley’s Scottish childhood friend, was published by Saraband in 2013.

In 2010, I published a literary biography of the relationships nine women writers had with their male counterparts, Between the Sheets, which was reviewed widely, including by the New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The Sunday Times and The Financial Times. It was shortlisted in the ‘non-fiction’ category for Scottish Book of the Year, 2011.

I have a PhD on the work of James Joyce, and have won two Creative Scotland writers’ bursaries. In 2014, I was Writer-in-Residence at Gladstone’s Library. I have recently completed a historical novel about Madeleine Smith, the Victorian Scotswoman found ‘not ‘proven’ of poisoning her lover with arsenic in 1857. My agent is Ian Drury at http://www.sheilland.com/