Kate Horsley (UK author)

Kate Horsley is the author of two novels, The American Girl and The Monster’s Wife. Most of her short and long fiction, including The American Girl, has been within the crime fiction genre, although her début novel, The Monster’s Wife, is historical gothic fiction. Horsley is a co-editor (with her mother, Lee Horsley) of crime fiction review site crimeculture.com.

Early life

The child of academics, Horsley had an unconventional upbringing and was educated at home for parts of her childhood. She studied English Literature at Oxford University and at the age of 21, she moved to Boston to take up a scholarship at Harvard where she studied Medieval Literature. She lectured at Harvard for a year before returning to the UK.

Career

Horsley's poems and short fiction have been published in a number of magazines and anthologies including The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime.

Her first novel, The Monster's Wife, was published by Barbican Press in September 2014. A sequel to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the novel is set on an island in the Scottish Orkneys and narrated from the perspective of the girl Victor Frankenstein transformed into a bride for his monster.

Her second novel, The American Girl, was published by William Morrow in August 2016.

Awards

In 2014, Horsley was shortlisted for the Scottish First Book of the Year (Saltire) Award for The Monster’s Wife. She has previously won awards for her work from Sentinel Literary Quarterly and Adoption Matters Northwest and been shortlisted for an Asham award for short fiction and a Ravenglass Poetry Press Prize.