Sally grew up in the north of England on a farm. After qualifying as a teacher, she moved on to working in public health, supporting community groups on health and emotional wellbeing issues. Later, she completed an MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Since that time, she has lived in Bristol and written lots of reports and health strategies, as well as writing novels and short stories. Many of these have reached the shortlist stage of writing competitions. When she is not writing, she walks long distance trails, which gives her time to think.

“Structural Damage came about after a visit to the east coast of Yorkshire. As a child, I had stayed there, with my cousins, in the summer holidays. It was a shock to find that the cliff-top café where we used to hang about and the caravan site where we had a paper round had long gone, taken by the sea. Coastal erosion happens fast in this area. And I wondered about the people losing their homes and the farmers seeing their fields disappear. How on earth did they cope? For some time, the interconnections between people’s lives and the landscape have featured strongly in my writing. And as the novel progressed, the story tied in with my interest in the ways that people manage change and, in particular, cope with endings. As the characters developed, all these things came together.”

Our judge, Laura Williams, commented: “I was so looking forward to judging the Caledonia Novel Award, and it was just the experience I’d hoped it would be. It was a pleasure to dive into so many different stories from all over and of every different genre. The calibre of entries was exceptionally high, and it was deliciously difficult to select the shortlist from the longlist, and then the winner from these six novels. The shortlist ranges from heartbreaking literary fiction to a brilliant YA adventure story, from stunning true crime to gripping historical fiction. It was a pleasure to read each and every one of these stories.”

Emilia grew up in Sydney, Australia and has written stories for as long as she can remember. She studied English Literature at university before training as a lawyer: a career that has enhanced her love of precise language. After having a life-changing stroke in her 20s, she decided to pursue her childhood dream of becoming an author. She has recently completed Curtis Brown Creative’s Three Month Online Novel Writing Course. She lives in south-east London with her partner and far too many books.

“I spent part of 2020 living in Cumbria, where Weyward is set – its wild beauty was a huge inspiration, as was the grim history of the Pendle witch trials that took place nearby in 1612. During the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, I was haunted by thoughts of those trapped at home with their abusers. These three things coalesced into the idea for Weyward. I wanted the novel to examine male violence while also showcasing female power and resilience: a story about witches seemed the perfect way to do this. At the end of the day, I think other women have been the greatest inspiration for Weyward – I really wanted to highlight that many of us don’t realise how much inner strength we have, until we need to use it.”

Victoria grew up in the small town of Kaukauna, Wisconsin, USA. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a marketing degree and working for a year in retail, she confirmed decidedly that retail was not for her. So, she sold her car, took out many loans, and enrolled at NYU School of Law. Upon graduation, she took a litigation position at a large Chicago law firm where she made partner before scaling back to focus on her three children. Victoria currently assists her husband in the running of a letterpress printing company and, of course, writes!

“I confess that the inspiration for The Iron Widow didn’t arise from any personal experience or ideology, but from a story I actively sought out. As a lover of mysteries and realistic historical fiction, I went looking for an unsolved crime set in the past to write about, and when I came across the Hall-Mills murders, I knew I had found it. The 1922 double murder of the Episcopalian Reverend Edward Hall and choir singer Eleanor Mills incited one of the first ‘media circuses’ in the United States and reportedly inspired elements of The Great Gatsby. Yet most intriguing to me was the reverend’s enigmatic widow and prime suspect Frances: a middle-aged heiress who kept faith in her husband despite overwhelming evidence of his affair with the lovely and much younger Eleanor.

Lucy Steeds was born and raised in London. She studied English Literature and then World Literatures at Oxford University, where she specialised in postcolonial literature. She was one of 38 writers selected for the London Library’s inaugural Emerging Writers Programme, where she wrote The Map of Lost Lands. The manuscript won the Joan Aiken Future Classics Prize and the Flash 500 Novel Competition. She is interested in the legacy of colonialism, its impact on literature, and forgotten aspects of history.

“Writing The Map of Lost Lands began with a question: what would happen if everything you drew on a map happened in real life? I have always been fascinated by cartography, and the idea that maps not only reflect the world around us, but create it too. I wanted to write the story of a girl searching for her lost homeland; an island not found on any map. I set the novel in 1871, a time of high imperialism when Europe was ruthlessly carving up the rest of the world. It was a time when there were still blank spaces on European maps; unexplored, ‘undiscovered’ lands. My characters came to life from the pieces of research I gathered, magpie-like, along the way, embodying strange and horrifying facets of the era: an artist, an explorer, a circus impresario, a nomad, a pawn-shop owner, and a ‘human spectacle’. At the heart of the novel is Marnie’s search for her homeland, but there is also a larger relationship between people and places; of people belonging to places, and places belonging to people.”

Originally from the North Gower in Swansea, Carys studied Theatre at Aberystwyth University before going on to work as a producer for National Theatre Wales, Volcano Theatre Company and other socially engaged arts projects. In 2013 she moved to Andalucía for a year, lost her heart to the califal city of Córdoba and stayed for seven years. Keeping her connections with Wales strong, she graduated from the University of South Wales with an MPhil in Writing in 2017 and has had short stories published by Honno Press, Parthian Books and most recently, Mslexia Magazine. She now lives in Aragón, Spain where she works as a facilitator and language teacher.

“Truth Like Water began as the creative project for my MPhil in Writing; initially it was a novel about a traumatized teenager coming to terms with death in the midst of rural and personal isolation. I lost my own mother very suddenly when I was 22 and the explosion of grief and subsequent disintegration of my family unit was something I was completely unprepared for. As morbid as it sounds, this made me fascinated to write about loss and the many powerful ways it can turn lives upside down and inside out. In the first version of the book Catrin was grieving but in denial, and the missing girl was a catalyst for her finally admitting to her loss. Although I had positive feedback about the character and setting, something in that version was just not working. I received some clear-sighted feedback that suggested an adult’s POV could offer greater room for emotional depth and perspective. It clicked and I rewrote the book from scratch, thoroughly enjoying the change of POV, adding more layers for Catrin to contend with and threading in lots of secrets, grudges and unspoken menace from the supposedly close community she lives in. Although I wanted to show her unresolved grief and how this was blocking her from moving forwards in life, I also wanted to create a page-turning tension with the twin threads of ‘what really happened to her mother?’ and ‘what is going to happen to the missing girl on the estuary?’”