About

Lucy and Todd are American novelists and editors, based in Scotland.

The Fiction Atelier offers expert advice to serious writers of fiction.

(For further info, just email us at fictionatelier@gmail.com.)

 

LUCY ELLMANN

Lucy has published seven novels: Sweet Desserts (winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize), Varying Degrees of Hopelessness, Man or Mango? A Lament, Dot in the Universe, Doctors & Nurses, Mim, and, in 2019, Ducks, Newburyport (shortlisted for the Booker and winner of the Goldsmiths Prize).

Her short stories have appeared in magazines, newspapers and anthologies. She has taught fiction at the Arvon Foundation and for three years was a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Kent. Her screenplay, The Spy Who Caught a Cold, was broadcast on Channel 4.

She has been a Hawthornden Fellow, and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow in Edinburgh and Dundee. For some time she was a regular TV reviewer and columnist for the Independent on Sunday and New Statesman and Society, and has reviewed art and books for the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Independent, Time Out, Art Monthly, the Times Literary Supplement, the Telegraph, the Herald, the Scottish Review of Books, The Evergreen, Bookforum and other publications. Longer articles have appeared in the online magazine, Aeon and The Baffler.

Ducks, Newburyport, ‘a wildly ambitious and righteously angry portrait of contemporary America’ (Observer), was described in the Bookseller as ‘a modernist masterpiece’. It was published in the UK by Galley Beggar Press on July 4, 2019, and in the US and Canada in September, 2019, by Biblioasis. It has also come out in India and Australia. Several translations are in progress.

 

TODD McEWEN

Todd has published five novels: Fisher’s Hornpipe, McX: A Romance of the Dour, Arithmetic, Who Sleeps with Katz, and The Five Simple Machines. A book of essays on America, How Not to be American, was published by Aurum in 2013. He was an editorial consultant at Granta for several years and has been one of its major contributors. He has taught writing and literature at all levels in the U.S. and in Britain, holding fellowships in North Carolina, Aberdeen and Orkney.

For three years he was a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Kent in Canterbury. As well as publishing his work in The Paris Magazine, City Picks: New York, the Scottish Review of Books, and The Evergreen, Todd has reviewed for the Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday, and the Guardian; he now regularly reviews fiction for the Herald and the National.

Todd has been a Hawthornden Fellow, and was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Glasgow University. Committed to the promotion of good literature, he has helped many writers into print.

Who Sleeps with Katz will be republished by CB Editions in 2020.

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N.B. All original material in this blog is the copyright of Lucy Ellmann and Todd McEwen. We have made every effort to credit quotations borrowed from other sources.