Eley Williams

Eley Williams FRSL is a British writer.[1] Her debut collection of prose, Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx Press, 2017), was awarded the Republic of Consciousness Prize[2] and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize 2018.[3] With writing anthologised in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story (Penguin Classics, 2018),[4] Liberating the Canon (Dostoevsky Wannabe, 2018)[5] and Not Here: A Queer Anthology of Loneliness (Pilot Press, 2017),[6] she is an alumna of the MacDowell workshop and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.[7] She teaches at Royal Holloway, University of London,[8] and supervises Jungftak, a journal for contemporary prose poetry.[9]

Her first novel, The Liar's Dictionary, was published in 2020, described in The Guardian as a "virtuoso performance full of charm... a glorious novel – a perfectly crafted investigation of our ability to define words and their power to define us".[10] Stuart Kelly in a review in The Spectator wrote of the book: "It deals with love as something which cannot be put into words, and dare not speak its name (done neither stridently nor sentimentally). It is, in short, a delight."[11]