Introducing our New Authors for 2024
Sue Amos, Katie Mitchelson, Martin Raymond, Tori Beat and Bernie McQuillan will publish novels with Indie Novella in 2024
As we begin 2024, we would like to say a huge thank you to all of you for being an integral part of what was in so many ways was an incredible 2023 for Indie Novella. We had the Watson, Little x Indie Novella Prize! And through it we met so many amazing authors and were so thrilled to produce our anthology, featuring our shortlisted 12 writers. On the back of this we made The Bookseller Rising Stars list and were delighted to expand our connections with agents, writers and publishers through the Indie Novella Writing Course and our Workshops in Hackney, Islington and Sheffield. Our next online writing course starts on the 30th January and you can book your place here. We hughly recommend the course to anyone either looking to draft their novel or anyone who is struggling placing their novel with an agent or publisher. The course provided insight from literary agency Watson, Little and contributions from other key figures in publishing, all to making publishing more transparent and explain what the publishing community is looking for when taking on a novel. For those of you London based our Hackney Writing Circle is back on Thursday 25th January at the Mildmay Club (for info here). Also, please keep the 16th March free as we have a very special announcement coming soon.
But firstly, we are absolutely thrilled to announce our new authors for 2024. With novels being released in time for our autumn collection, Indie Novella is delighted to welcome some of the most exciting emerging novelists whose writing absolutely captivated us.
After a freelance television career, Sue Amos took a career break and began to write in her spare time. Inspired by forgotten, misremembered scraps of history, she wrote two novels under the pen name Sarah Roux. Her first, A Painted Samovar is a homage to her maternal Jewish grandfather while The Chronicles of Harriet Shelley gives voice to the first wife of the poet, Percy Shelley.
Submitting her 3rd novel to the Watson Little x Indie Novella Prize, Sue decided she needed to come out from the shadows to write under her real name, having an inkling this would prove to be auspicious! Born and bred in North London, and now resides in the Chilterns with her husband, son, and dog, Teardrop also represents a tribute to Sue’s Sri Lankan heritage and her work shedding light on the post-colonial culture of her ancestors. Teardrop won the 2023 Watson Little x Indie Novella Prize.
Martin Raymond is an unrepentant late starter. After working in communications for the NHS, teaching in schools and universities, plus some broadcasting with BBC Radio Scotland, he studied creative writing at Stirling University. His work has been longlisted for the Watson, Little x Indie Novella Prize and shortlisted for the VS Pritchett Short Story Prize. His short stories have appeared in the New Writing Scotland annual collection in 2019, 2020 and 2023. Lotte is his first novel.
Katie Mitchelson has worked as a youth worker in Hartlepool, in the North-east, which inspired the town of Waterfell in Wrecked. Her work with young people inspired a lot of her writing during her creative writing PhD, compelling her to write about teenagers who do not realise that they are victims, who do not realise that they are being groomed for criminality, and the wider problems of country lines.
Making sense of existence is the undercurrent of Katie's writing, as she seeks to unravel the complexities of inequality and raise awareness of important issues in the hope of inspiring important social reforms. Child criminal exploitation is just one of the sociological injustices Katie hopes to explore and her debut novel Wrecked is a brilliant exploration of these incredibly complex themes in breathtakingly relatable way.
Tori Beat is a former lawyer turned writer from Derbyshire, where she lives with her husband and two young children. Tori rediscovered her love of writing after leaving her career in law to study an Arts & Humanities degree, which led her to submit her first novel, Class of ’99, to the Watson Little x Indie Novella Prize in 2023. Through her writing, Tori explores the taboo surrounding mental health, inspired by her own experience of obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as issues of social and gender inequality and the impact and complexity of human relationships.
Bernie McQuillan is a Northern Irish writer, originally from County Tyrone and based in Belfast with her husband and four children. Her short story won the North Belfast Festival award in 2023. Shortlisted stories were published in the Bournemouth Writing and Leicester Writes anthologies and other stories appear in journals including Spontaneity, The Incubator, The Honest Ulsterman, Women's Way (Ireland) and The Birmingham Arts Journal (US).
In The Lobster Pot, the dramatic landscape of County Donegal is the perfect setting to explore Kitty’s obsession and destructive love and to meet Alana, the nurse-turned sleuth, in her debut mystery novel. Follow Bernie @BernieMcQuillan.
And finally, we are delighted to announce that Indie Novella’s own Damien Mosley will be releasing his second novel, Relationship on the Green, in late 2024.
