Hello and welcome to ejswift.co.uk.
My work
My most recent novel, WHEN THERE ARE WOLVES AGAIN, is climate fiction which follows activist Lucy and filmmaker Hester across half a century, through the fight to restore Britain’s depleted natural habitats and revive the species who once shared the island.
My previous novel, THE CORAL BONES, connects three women across the centuries by their love of the ocean. THE CORAL BONES was shortlisted for the BSFA Award for Best Novel, The Kitschies Red Tentacle and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction book of the year.
Earlier novels are PARIS ADRIFT, a tale of bartenders, time travel and the City of Light, and The Osiris Project, a speculative fiction trilogy exploring the geopolitical impacts of climate breakdown. Book One, OSIRIS, is set in a future ocean metropolis, a failed utopia whose inhabitants believe they live on the last city on earth. The second book, CATAVEIRO, is set in South America, and expands the series to explore the world beyond Osiris. The series concludes with TAMARUQ.
My short fiction has appeared in anthologies from Vintage, Salt Publishing, Jurassic London, NewCon Press and Solaris, and has been translated into Chinese and Polish. My short story “Saga’s Children” (The Lowest Heaven, 2013, Jurassic) was shortlisted for a BSFA Award. “The Spiders of Stockholm” (Irregularity, 2014, Jurassic) was longlisted for the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.
Representation
I am represented by Margaret Halton at PEW Literary.
Inspirations
Below are a few examples of writers and works I love:
Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin; Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum; Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others; Teju Cole’s Open City; Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad; Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love; Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial; Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border; Samantha Harvey’s Dear Thief; Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour; Kelly Link’s Pretty Monsters; Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian; David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas; Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; Christopher Priest’s The Islanders, Alastair Reynolds’ House of Suns; Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future; Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven; Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World; Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station; Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book.
When not writing
You’ll find me at pole or trapeze, or in my garden, looking out for the woodpecker.
E. J. Swift 