Based in Cumbria, Katie Hale won a Northern Debut Award for her poetry collection, White Ghosts (Nine Arches, 2023). Katie is a former MacDowell Fellow and winner of the Palette Poetry Prize, Munster Chapbook Prize and Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize. Her short fiction has been longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. Her debut novel, My Name Is Monster, was published in 2019. She won a Northern Writers' Award for Fiction in 2022 to work on The Edge of Solitude.@halekatie | @katiescribbles | halekatie.com

Fresh and powerful . . . Hale's writing is assured and . . . strikingly beautiful . . . Most of all, the book has a great generosity and empathy for monsterdom, and refreshingly allows its characters to find happiness without becoming more ordinary . . . Hale is certainly a skilful writer with a compelling voice, and her ideas are bold and promising