I’m Ella, a writer and researcher living in Malta. I grew up in Warwickshire in the West Midlands—right on the isogloss, so sometimes I pronounce bath and grass like a northerner and sometimes like a southerner. I rarely know which it’ll be before the words leave my mouth. My dad was a sociolinguist (which is why I know about isoglosses) and a storyteller, and my childhood was brimming with folktales, folksongs, old maps and etymological dictionaries. All of these continue to influence my writing.

I have always written, even if only for myself, and my writing has almost always been inspired by something from folklore—a motif from a story, a line from a song, a strange placename, an interesting custom… anything intriguing that gets under my skin. My early interest in folklore took me to Edinburgh University to study ethnology, a discipline that examines the everyday culture of our own and others’ communities. I loved the city and the subject so much that I stayed there for sixteen years, letting my imagination run wild in the closes and wynds of the Old Town. 

While I was in Edinburgh, I also became fascinated by the oral (or, rather, corp-oral) traditions of Scotland’s deaf communities—passed on not by word of mouth, but by sign of hand. I ended up doing a PhD about signed storytelling practices and the exclusion of deaf heritage from conversations about Scotland’s cultural landscape. I went on to work in several education-adjacent roles involving British Sign Language and the preservation of deaf heritage. I loved being involved in this community-based work and still do occasional projects in this field, but I am now first and foremost a writer.

I write a bit of everything—fiction (either very short or very long, rarely anything in between), creative nonfiction, research-based and personal essays, and occasionally poetry and picture books. Most of my fiction is speculative, involving the supernatural or something a little bit weird, dark or uncanny, and my creative nonfiction and personal essays tend to deal with memory-making and how the past exists in the present. I’m one of those writers who needs to have multiple projects on the go at any one time, so for the last few years I’ve been jumping between producing shorter pieces (see publications) and working on a mysterious kid-lit novel about secrets, being forgotten, and how we reconcile ourselves to what we can’t know. An early draft of this novel was longlisted for the Mslexia Children’s and YA Novel Competition 2022; its revised opening was shortlisted for the Searchlight Writing for Children Awards 2024. 

Other work has also been well-received. My personal essay ‘Girl as Helper’ was shortlisted for the Forge Literary Magazine’s Flash Non-Fiction Competition 2023, and received an honourable mention in the Women On Writing Q1 Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest 2025. My flash fiction piece ‘Vindication of the Wigtown Martyrs’ won third prize in The Fiction Factory Flash Fiction Competition 2023, and was also longlisted for The Brilliant Writing Brilliant Flash Fiction Competition 2023. My poem ‘Sonder’ won second prize in the Oprelle Matter Poetry Contest 2023, and ‘Graffiti’ was shortlisted, with both being published in the resulting anthology. ‘Graffiti’ was also longlisted in the Pen Nib International Poetry Competition 2021, and another poem, ‘Saskia in The Night Watch’, was highly commended.

I now live in Malta, a tiny island state in the middle of the Mediterranean, in a beautiful historic city built of golden limestone. I live with my partner, a haunted terracotta head and several hundred notebooks which I am filling up with ideas for more stories and poems—watch this space!