Hawthornden Castle Writers
Since 2022
Nawaaz Ahmed
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Nawaaz Ahmed is a transplant from Tamil Nadu, India. Before turning to writing, he was a computer scientist, researching search algorithms for Yahoo. He holds an MFA from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is the recipient of residencies from Macdowell, VCCA, Yaddo, Djerassi and Hawthornden. His debut novel Radiant Fugitives (2021) was a finalist for the 2022 Pen/Faulkner Award and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, was longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Aspen Literary Prize, and received the Gina Berriault award. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working on his second novel, exploring the who, what and why of our current technological moment.
Dominic Amerena
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Dominic Amerena's work has been published widely and he's won numerous prizes, grants and scholarships, most recently: the inaugural Speculate Prize, the Alan Marshall Short Story Award and an Australia Council New Work Grant. He recently completed his first novel, I Want Everything, and a PhD at the University of RMIT. He lives in Athens, Greece, with his wife, the essayist, Ellena Savage.
Photograph by Anna Tagkalou Photography
Judith Baumel
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Judith Baumel’s books are The Weight of Numbers , for which she won The Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets; Now ; The Kangaroo Girl ; Passeggiate and Thorny . She is Professor Emerita of English and Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Adelphi University. She has served as President of The Association of Writers and Writing Programs, director of The Poetry Society of America and a Fulbright Scholar in Italy.
Sarah Chihaya
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Sarah Chihaya is a critic, essayist, and editor, and is the recipient of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, New York magazine, and The Yale Review, among other places. She has taught at Princeton University and NYU, and holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Queens, New York.
Tim Early
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Tim Earley is the author of five collections of poems, including Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (Horse Less Press, 2014), winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and Epigrams Both Ludic and Regicidal (Delete Press,, 2019). An e-chapbook, Rattle Rib , was published by Garden Door Press in 2025. He is also the creator/lead writer of the tabletop roleplaying game, Holler: An Appalachian Apocalypse . He lives in Asheville, North Carolina and teaches online courses in creative writing, Appalachian literature, British literature, and fantasy literature for the University of Mississippi.
Alicia Foster
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Alicia Foster is a novelist, art historian and curator. Her novel Warpaint was published with Penguin in 2013. She has solo curated exhibitions of the work of Jessica Dismorr and Gwen John, and associate curated Tate Gallery's Now You See Us: Women Artists 1500-1920 in 2024. Her most recent book, Gwen John, Art and Life in London and Paris was published with Thames & Hudson in 2023, shortlisted for the Berger prize, and a Times book of the year. Her next book The Real Bohemians will be published with Virago in 2027.
Photograph by John Foster
Praveen Herat
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Praveen Herat, born in London to Sri Lankan parents and educated in the UK, where he graduated from Oxford and completed UEA’s Creative Writing MA, Praveen Herat currently resides in Paris. But it was a three-year period living in Phnom Penh that marked him profoundly as a writer. This would be the prelude to the research and writing that became Between This World and the Next , winner of the 2022 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. A literary thriller that charts the evolution of transnational crime after the fall of the Soviet Union, Between This World and the Next criss-crosses the globe, from Cambodia to Ukraine, Dubai, and Liberia.
Neal Hovelmeier
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Neal Hovelmeier was born in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1978 and is the author of three novels: Unfeeling, (2005), shortlisted for the 2006 Dylan Thomas Prize, Of Beasts and Beings (2010) and What Happened to Us (2018) . His short fiction has appeared in the Cambridge Literary Review and received Honourable Mention by the judges of the Manchester Prize. He was a finalist for the Rolex Mentor-Protégé Initiative in 2014 and in 2009, 2015 & 2025 a Fellow of the Hawthornden Writers’ Residency. In 2019 he was appointed the Robert G. James Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He holds a PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand, where he has also been an Associate Research Fellow. He writes under the pseudonym of Ian Holding.
Sunwoo Jeong
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Sunwoo Jeong is a Korean writer living in NYC and Seoul in alternation. A Kundiman Fellow and a Clarion alum, she has a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University. Her work has appeared in Split Lip, Lightspeed, and Uncanny magazine, among others, and has been included in the Wigleaf Top 50 Long List. She is currently working on a collection of linked short stories and a novel. You can find her at @translunarytree.
Lucy Jones
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Lucy Jones is a British writer and literary translator from the German who lives in Berlin. She has translated the work of Anke Stelling, Silke Scheuermann and Ronald M. Schernikau, among others, and was runner-up in the 2023 Schlegel-Tieck Prize for her translation of Die Geschwister (Siblings) by Brigitte Reimann. Her own short creative non-fiction has appeared in SAND , Pigeon Pages NYC , LitroMag and others. She is currently writing her first book.
Photograph by Oliver Toth
Melanie Kassel
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Melanie Kassel is a writer from Chicago. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a World Fantasy Award Winner, she's had short fiction published in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern , The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy , Electric Literature , and elsewhere. She spent her time at Hawthornden Castle searching for slugs and working on a novel.
Helen Klein Ross
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Helen Klein Ross is the author of three novels: The Latecomers (Little, Brown, 2018), What Was Mine (Simon & Schuster, 2016) and Making It: A Novel of Madison Avenue (Simon & Schuster, 2013). She is editor and creator of The Traveler's Vade Mecum (Red Hen Press, 2016), an anthology of new poems titled by 1853 telegrams, solicited from poets including Frank Bidart, Billy Collins and Emily Fragos. Her poetry and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal and in The Iowa Review where she won the 2014 Iowa Review award in poetry. She holds a BA from Cornell and an MFA from The New School. Helen lives in Manhattan and Salisbury, CT.
Photograph by John Gruen
Maggie Millner
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Maggie Millner is the author of Couplets , a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, a New York Times Editors' Choice, one of The Atlantic 's ten best books of 2023, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Award in Poetry and the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian poetry. Couplets has been (or will be) translated into six languages and published in seven countries. Maggie's poems have appeared in Best American Poetry , The New Yorker, The Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation , and elsewhere. She is a Senior Lecturer and Associate Research Scholar at Yale and a Senior Editor at The Yale Review.
Photograph by Sarah Wagner Miller
Ange Mlinko
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Ange Mlinko is the author of seven books of poetry: Foxglovewise (2025), Venice (2022); Distant Mandate (2017); Marvelous Things Overheard (2013), which was selected by both the New Yorker and the Boston Globe as a best book of 2013; Shoulder Season (2010), a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award; Starred Wire (2005), which was a National Poetry Series winner in 2004 and a finalist for the James Laughlin Award; and Matinees (1999). A book of lyric criticism, Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets, was published in 2024 from Oxford University Press.
Mlinko is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Poetry Foundation’s Frederick Brock prize and the Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism. She served as poetry editor for The Nation from 2013-16, and her criticism appears regularly in the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. She teaches poetry and directs the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and is poetry editor for the journal Subtropics.
Photograph by Jimmy Ho
Samantha Neugebauer
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Samantha Neugebauer is a lecturer at NYU D.C., a senior editor at Painted Bride Quarterly , and regular contributor to the podcast Slush Pile . Her writing has been nominated for inclusion in Best American Short Stories and has appeared in Ploughshares , The Hopkins Review , The Offing , Vassar Review , and elsewhere. She is also co-host of the new short story review channel, Short Story Boudoir . Previously, Samantha spent years working abroad at NYU’s campuses in Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, London, Berlin, Florence, and Athens. Originally from Philadelphia, she holds degrees from Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania, and NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study; she is a first-generation college graduate. At Hawthornden, she finished a novel.
Jørgen Norheim
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Jørgen Norheim (b. 1952) is a Norwegian author, who lives in Berlin. Since his debut in 1994, he has published five novels, all of which deal with themes from modern European history, and one non-fiction book (travel essays, 2019). His last novel, Aldri redd for mørkets makt (2016), thematizes the left-wing political movement in Norway in the 1920s and 1970s, in the shadow of Stalin. His sixth novel will be published in the fall of 2025, which is a counterfactual historical novel. The novel Adjutanten (2008) has been translated into German. In 2002 he was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize for the novel Ingen er så trygg i fare , and in 2008 for the Norwegian Brage Prize for the novel Adjutanten . Norheim is a historian from the University of Oslo, with theology and philosophy as additional subjects. He was from 1987 to 1996 the subeditor of the journal Syn og Segn by the publishing house Det Norske Samlaget, Oslo. He has financed his writing through various grants and a part-time job as a metro driver in Oslo.
Photograph by Sara Sanderu
Pascal O’Loughlin
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Pascal O’Loughlin is a librarian and the co-ordinator of the Liverpool Irish Festival. His novels are Now Legwarmers (2018) and The Goddess Lens (2020). He lives on the Wirral peninsula in North West England.
Deborah Paredez
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Deborah Paredez is the author of four books: the critical memoir American Diva: Extraordinary, Unruly, Fabulous (Norton, 2024), the scholarly study Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory (Duke, 2009), and the poetry collections This Side of Skin (Wings Press, 2002) and Year of the Dog (BOA Editions, 2020), winner of the 2020 Writers' League of Texas Poetry Book Award and a New York Times New and Notable Book. Her poetry and essays have appeared in The New York Times , Los Angeles Review of Books , The Boston Review , Poetry , and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of CantoMundo, a national organization dedicated to Latinx poets and poetry. She lives in New York City where she is an Associate Professor and Chair of the creative writing program at Columbia University.
Photograph by Sammy Tunis
Dolores Payás
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Dolores Payás is a writer and translator. She was born in Spain (1955) but from early on has made her home in many different countries. She has lived in Mexico City, Paris, Barcelona, Beijing and the Peloponnese. For decades she worked in film and television, mainly as a scriptwriter, but in 2012 she left the world of filming to concentrate on writing. It was long in the making, but one of the most important decisions of her life. She claims never to have regretted it for a single second. As a writer, she has published four novels, a travelogue and a literary essay. Those she has translated include Patrick Leigh Fermor, Christopher Isherwood and Somerset Maugham. Her last novel - Ultimate Love , Círculo de Tiza, 2023 - was shortlisted for the Premio Azorín. Her most recent translation was an edited selection of Dickens journalism: Pasiones públicas, emociones privadas. Escritos periodísticos, Charles Dickens. Editorial Gatopardo 2024.
Irrepressible and adventurous, Payas has a sharp sense of humour and an idiosyncratic literary style, combining facets of the screenwriter, traveller, passionate reader and translator. Her writing is fluent, intelligent, biting and sensual, that of one who juggles words and literary genres. She defines herself as “babélica” (polyglot) and “apátrida” (stateless), and currently lives between Greece, Switzerland and Spain.
Photograph by Giota Koutelou
Meara Sharma
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Meara Sharma is a writer and artist. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in The Believer , the New York Times , the Washington Post , Artforum , Ambit , Vogue , the Washington Square Review , Apartamento , and elsewhere. She has produced radio programmes and podcasts for NPR, BBC Radio 4, Audible, and Spotify, and has received residencies and fellowships from Villa Lena, Cove Park, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the University of Southern California. A longtime editor for Guernica and the founding editor-in-chief of Adi , she is currently senior editor of Elastic , a new magazine of psychedelic art and literature. With roots in Massachusetts and South India, she currently lives between London and Glasgow.
Photograph by Alice Zoo
Katriona Shine
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Katriona Shine is an Irish-Norwegian writer and architect. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Habitat, published by the Lilliput Press in March 2024, was a Sunday Times, Irish Times and The Journal Most Anticipated Book of 2024 and longlisted for the McKitterick Prize. It received positive reviews in The Irish Times, The Irish Independent, The Irish Examiner, RTÉ and elsewhere. She was an awardee of the Evolution Programme at the Irish Writers Centre 2024/2025 and a guest at the opening of the Cork World Book Festival 2025. She represented Dublin UNESCO City of Literature at the Nanjing International Writers' Residency in November 2022. She has received a Literature Bursary Award and two Agility Awards from the Arts Council of Ireland. Her writing has been published in The Dublin Review, Southword, Aesthetica, Hemingway Shorts, Channel, Nanjing Daily, Frogpond and elsewhere.
Caroline smith
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2022
Caroline Smith trained as a sculptor at Goldsmiths. She lives in Wembley and works with refugees. ‘ The Immigration Handbook’ (Seren) was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and translated into Italian by Prof Paola Splendore (edizioni dell’asino). Smith is widely published in journals and anthologies and has won and been placed in many poetry prizes. Her new book, Bycatch’ will be published in October 2025 by Nine Arches Press. In conjunction with Brent Libraries, Smith has started ‘Poetry in Wembley’ 160+One. This series of readings brings contemporary poets to diaspora communities. It celebrates the 160 languages spoken in Brent plus the unifying language of poetry.
Before 2022
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2021
Georgie Codd
Donna Daley-Clarke
Miranda Doyle
Beatrice Garland
Victoria Gosling
Emily Haworth-Booth
Holly Howitt-Dring
Mark Lawlor
Moira McPartlin
Heather Parry
Joanna Pocock
George Ttoouli
Vint Virga
Peter Wallis
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2020
Keggie Carew
Carin Clevidence
Iain Galbraith
Katie Hale
Christopher Meredith
Stephen O’Rourke
Vivianne Perret
Nina von Staffeldt
Lydia Syson
Merrie Williams
Felicia Yap
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2019
Collen Abel
Rachel Cantor
Madeline Carey
Isabelle Courteau
Effie Currell
Kate Davies
Viet Dinh
Sue Healy
Daniel Heema van Voss
Susan Henderson
Ramona Herdman
Sophie Herxheimer
Ella Hickson
Mary-Jane Holmes
Jerzy Kozlowski
Margaret Luongo
Alexander Peer
Penelope Pelizzon
Gary Peter
Rena Priest
Michael Prior
Cynthia Reeves
Amali Rodrigo
Allie Rogers
Marybeth Rua-Larsen
Elizabeth Rubin
Luis Sagasti
Marin Sardy
Dana Schwartz
Anna Sheremet
Penny Shutt
Andre Slot
Mackenzie Smith
Ann Snodgrass
Degna Stone
Kate Sutherland
Diana Svennes-Smith
Steven Tagle
Royston Tester
Mimi Thebo
Pamela Thompson
Ruby Turok-Squire
Diana Wagman
Rebecca Watts
Deborah Willis
James Womack
Saul Wordsworth
Gareth Writer-Davies
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2018
Anna Bischofberger
Irina Bogatyreva
Charlie Bondhus
Phoebe Bright
Ezra Carlsen
Olivia Cerrone
Leland Cheuk
Sheena Cook
MT Cozzola
Adrian Cretu
Heather Cross
Selina Fillinger
Patricia Goldstone
Jodie Hollander
Sandra Hunter
Blair Hurley
Tara Ison
Paula Jennings
Laura Kaye
Susan Kim
Helen Klein Ross
Gertraud Klemm
Toby Litt
Kirsty Logan
Victoria Mackenzie
Kirsteen Macleod
Joshua Mak
Jill Munro
Tal Nitzan
Daniel Powell
Sue Proffitt
Ingrid Ruthig
Nelly Shulman
Susan Sims
Marek Sindelka
Diana Spechler
Travis Steele
Janet Sutherland
Liza Taylor
Fiona Thomson
Róisίn Tierney
Claire Trevien
Ruby Turok-Squire
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2017
Rob Atkinson
Penny Boxall
Judy Brown
Caroline Brothers
Jenna Butler
Amber Dodd
Louise Ells
Rebecca Farmer
Jane Feaver
David Francis
Jean Findlay
Peter Fogtdal
Susanna Forrest
Valeriya Fursova
Vishwas Gaitonde
Rosie Garland
Gerður Gudjonsdottir
John Greening
Gaia Holmes
Anthony Howell
Rosalind Hudis
Rosie Jackson
Alison Layland
Quinn Lewis
Lindsay MacGregor
Keith Mansfield
Fabian Martinez
Irina Mashinski
Phil Memmer
Andrew Miller
Lenore Myka
Pauline Plummer
Yvonne Reddick
Sam Riviere
Dana Sachs
Susan Salzer
Charlie Schneider
Sue Reid Sexton
Brittani Sonnenberg
Terese Svoboda
Alia Trabucco Zeran
Janis Valks
Todd Wronski
Jakob Ziguras
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2016
Jane Alexander
Tiffany Atkinson
Tulsi Badrinath
Helge Bille Nielsen
Jonathan Blum
Judith Bryan
Rita Bullwinkel
Sarah Butler
Yolanda Castano
Helena Drysdale
Roxanne Fay
Tom Feiling
Nick Fuller Googins
Cathy Galvin
Rebecca Gethin
Harry Man
Peyton Marshall
Agata Maslowska
Kseniya Melnik
Lambert-Sluder
David Lloyd
Colter Jackson
Anne Hanninen
Philip Hancock
Holly Hopkins
Tung-Hui Hu
Daniela Huruzanu
Lindsey Holland
Kathleen Winter
Claire Orchard
Leslie Pietrysk
Tom Peter
Marjorie Sandor
Nat Schmookler
Fiona Shaw
Margaret Skea
Catherine Simpson
Susan Stinson
Rebecca Stott
Sun Wei
Oleksandr Vilchynskyy
Irene Zabytko
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2015
Neil Ascherson
Martin Bennett
Matt Bryden
Frances Byrnes
Rajat Chaudhuri
Kate Chisholm
Cathy Ciepiela
Ken Cockburn
Kia Corthron
Sarah Cornwell
Peter Daniels
Chelsey Flood
Antoinette Fawcett
Matthew Francis
Maggie Gee
Alisa Ganieva
Madeleine George
David Guss
Samantha Harvey
Kaarima Hollo
Neal Hovelmaier
Marianne Jungmaier
Lisa Ko
Carolyn Kras
Kathryn Lackie
Anke Laufer
Vadim Levental
Peter McCarey
Katrina Naomi
Annemarie Ni Churreain
Abigail Parry
Tiago Patricio
Rosie Pearson
Iryna Shuvalova
Dana Smith
Jonathan Stone
Brittani Sonnenberg
Gretchen Somerfeld
Ellen Sussman
Rosanne Thomas
Janet Thielke
Pauls Toutonghi
Laura van der Berg
Dr Josephine von Zitzewitz
Barry Webster
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2014
Kate Ancell
Andrea Ashworth
Leslee Becker
Paula Bohince
Stuart Cook
Patricia Duncker
Philip Eade
Suzannah Evans
Patricia Ferguson
Amina Gautier
Pippa Goldschmidt
Matthew Gregory
Johannes Helden
Audrey Henderson
Sarah Holland-Batt
Aislinn Hunter
Julia Kissina
James Knox Whittet
Drew Larimore
Cy Lester
Carol Lee
Kara Lee Corthrun
Kara Lee
Zachary Leader
Victoria Leslie
Margaret Lloyd
Shaun McCarthy
Ella Montclare
Alexander Popov
Kate Potts
Natania Rosenfeld
Anna Scheremet
Sarah Salway
Cristina Sanchez-Andrade
Jaspreet Singh
Andrea Smith
Douglas Smith
Brittani Sonnenberg
Anne Stewart
Cheryl Tan
Royston Tester
Lindy Usher
Thom Vernon
Alan Warner
Kirsti Wishart
Diana Woodcock
Matthew Yorke
Mario Zambrano
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2013
Colin Begg
Nathaniel Bellows
Krzysztof Boczkowski
Nancy Campbell
Donna Daley-Clark
Kristina Darling
Lynn Davidson
Camille DeAngelis
Maria Dobrevska
Izabela Filipiak
James Fox
Maria Fusco
Carol Goodman
Terry Griggs
Lucretia Grindle
Jennifer Grotz
Alyson Hallet
Emily Hasler
Jodie Hollander
Tendai Huchu
Lynne Jonell
Joan Larkin
Gregory Leadbetter
Carol Lee
Rosanna Licari
Pippa Little
Kirsty Logan
Hannah Lowe
Carola Luther
Thomas Lysaght
Melanie Mauthner
Bill McCormick
Maureen McCoy
Helena McEwen
James McGuire
Rashaan Meneses
Louise Miller
Thais Miller
Candy Neubert
Elisabeth Olin
Louise Poulsen
Pam Schindler
Gretchen Schrafft
Julian Stannard
Susanne Stephan
Clare Wigfall
Colin Will
Alison Winch
Paul Witcover
HAWTHORNDEN CASTLE, 2012
Alice Albinia
Alison Amend
Kate Ancell
Natalia Biloskivets
Pat Borthwick
Gale Burns
Ben Clark
Jeramy Dodds
Joanne Elliot
Victoria Field
Andrew Forster
lsabel Galleymore
Vanessa Gebbie
Julian Gough
Masha Hamilton
Adam Horowitz
Sarah Howe
Michael Hulse
Clare Jarrett
Helmi Kekkonen
Suzie Le Blanc
Richard Lemm
Jenny Lewis
Paul Maddern
Susie Maguire
Gill McEvoy
Joan McGavin
Valerie Miner
Mauricio Montiel
Gergely Nagy
Fabrizio Napoleone
Roanne O'Neil
Celia Peters
Jennifer Potter
Richard Robbins
Henrietta Rose-Innes
Mykola Ryabchuk
Ruth Scurr
Deborah Serra
Julian Stannard
Louis Stern
Grazyna Strupczewska
Rebecca Swift
Lindy Usher
Marianne Villanueva
Rory Waterman
Jill Widner