Rosie Garland
Tagged ‘literary hero’ by The Skinny, Rosie writes long and short-form fiction, poetry and sings with post-punk band The March Violets. She also performs twisted cabaret as Rosie Lugosi the Vampire Queen. With a passion for language nurtured by libraries, she started out in spoken word, garnering praise from Apples and Snakes as ‘one of the country’s finest performance poets’.
Her award-winning short stories, poems and essays have been widely anthologised. Latest poetry collection is 'What Girls Do In The Dark' (Nine Arches Press). Her pamphlet 'Everything Must Go' (Holland Park Press 2012) draws on her experience of throat cancer. Rosie was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2017. She's also received the DaDa Award for Performance Artist of the Year, the Diva Award for Solo Performer, and a Poetry Award from the People’s Café, New York. She's proud to have been blessed by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
in 2018-2019 she was inaugural Writer-in-Residence at The John Rylands Library, Manchester, and in 2019 Val McDermid named her 'one of the UK's most compelling LGBT writers today'.
Her firm belief in the power of persistence stems from personal experience. Following twelve years at a reputable literary agency (who failed to place her novels), in 2011 she entered the inaugural Mslexia Novel Competition and won. This debut novel was published as ‘The Palace of Curiosities’ (HarperCollins 2013) and was nominated for both The Desmond Elliott and the Polari First Book Prize. Second novel, ‘Vixen’, was a Green Carnation Prize nominee. Latest novel, ‘The Night Brother’ has been described by The Times as 'a delight... with shades of Angela Carter.'
Reviews for 'The Night Brother':
"The Night Brother is a rich and ambitious tale set in late Victorian Manchester... Garland's prose is a delight, playful and exhuberant... Full marks!" - The Times
"Echoes of Angela Carter's more fantastical fiction reverberate through this exhuberant tale." - The Sunday Times
Praise for her previous novels:
"The Palace of Curiosities is a jewel-box of a novel, with page after page, scene after scene, layer after layer of treats and surprises. Garland is a real literary talent: definitely an author to watch." Sarah Waters
"Poetic, surprising and ultimately deeply moving, Vixen will have you hooked faster than it takes to drink a jug of ale and - unlike ale - it will stay with you long after you've reached the final page." Diva Magazine