Linda Cracknell
Linda Cracknell has built up an impressive track record since winning the Macallan/Scotland on Sunday short story competition in 1998. Her first collection, Life Drawing (11:9, 2000), was shortlisted for the Saltire First Book Award. She was a recipient of the Scottish Arts Council’s prestigious Creative Scotland Awards in 2007 for her non-fiction project Path. Linda has also been commissioned by the BBC to abridge D H Lawrence’s The Rainbow in ten parts, and to write an afternoon play based on the life of Valda Grieve, broadcast in 2005. Her many residency posts include time spent in Maine, New York, and Brownsbank Cottage, last home of poet Hugh MacDiarmid.
Books by Linda Cracknell
The Searching Glance
Second short story collection by Linda Cracknell
In the title story, a middle-aged woman reawakens to life through the medium of photography and without realising it starts to search for the nineteen year-old who might have been her child. Her journey requires ‘the searching glance’ – brief but intense, a quality shared by a number of characters in this collection, and a phrase that suggests the experience of the short story form itself.
The characters in these stories experience alienation, they watch, search for change in their lives (or resist it), and grapple with crises of identity or sexuality. Some of them try to break out of old or tired patterns. Some escape. Some fail. But all go on a journey of sorts. To many of them, the landscape is as animate in their story as fellow humans. Many of the stories are set in rural Scotland but urban and tropical settings are also explored. This is another strong collection, and a number of the stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies, and two have been read on Radio 4.
March 2008, Salt Publishing