Linda Cracknell

Linda CracknellLinda 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.

‘Linda Cracknell’s attention to detail is impressive: she writes as a painter in oils might paint, using a palette rich in both colour and texture, and the people she brings to life seem at once both part of and alienated from the landscapes in which they move. These are quiet yet passionate stories, subtle and striking in their effect.’
James Robertson

Books by Linda Cracknell

A Wilder Vein edited by Linda Cracknell

An anthology of new literary non-fiction that focuses on the relationship between people and the wild places of Britain and Ireland.  This is writing which animates a connection between humanity and the natural world, articulating discoveries and new ways of seeing – writing is, above all, a meditation on who we are as people in a still-wild world.  With a foreword by Robert Macfarlane, and contributors include Sara Maitland, Andrew Greig and Raja Shehadeh.

November 2009, Two Ravens Press

The Searching GlanceThe 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

Linda Cracknell is represented at Jenny Brown Associates by Jenny - .

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