About
Life in brief
I write - have always written - and I run Linen Press, a small indie publishing house for women writers that I founded in Edinburgh in 2005: www.linen-press.com. Writing and editing involves balance, but ever since I saw Elvira Madigan, I've secretly wanted to be a tight rope walker.
My seventeen books are published by HarperCollins, Oliver & Boyd, Pluto Press and The Women's Press. They include Write From the Start, a six-book, illustrated writing scheme for schools, and Shattered, a non-fiction book based on interviews with thirty people with severe Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. My two sons and I were badly affected and lived ( a kind of life) in the ME Ghetto for too many years.
All my recent books are fiction, interrupted by the official biography of splendid super realist painter, Rosa Branson.
Three books are close to my heart.
My debut novel, White Lies, is about an adulterous affair between a young soldier's wife and an intelligence officer who understands Africa, played out against the bloody backdrop of the 1950s Mao Mao uprising in Kenya. Epic and intimate, the novel spans four generations.
"A debut novel which possesses and is possessed by a rare authority of voice... the mother's voice that sings White Lies into unforgettability. Hers and Eve's. Their thoughts and writing ring like music."
- The Scotsman
Runner up Robert Louis Stevenson Award.
The Red Beach Hut tells the story of a fine but fated friendship between a man and a boy, both outsiders, who meet on a windswept English beach. Innocence and compassion are twisted by the tainted gaze of society's prejudices.
'With poetic, melodious prose, and with rhythms that illustrate Lynn Michell's assurance as a writer, the narrative moves back and forth between characters, as well as across the ebbs and flows of time and timelessness.'
- Joyce Goodman, author and Professor of History of Education
The Water All Around Us is about identity, loss and belonging and our search for a place that is home. Subtly it speaks of our threatened oceans and precious eco systems in the voice of a young whale who becomes separated from his pod.. The backcloth is a small Scottish island and the ocean that fringes it. The young whale, a crofter's daughter and a marathon swimmer are adrift and displaced. When their paths converge, the tension is ratcheted up and lives are put in danger.
'Once again, Lynn Michell gives us an entrancing narrative of the redemptive quality of human relationships, against a backdrop of the natural world and the urgent environmental challenges it faces.'
– Jenny Gorrod, Dundee Review of the Arts
Read the full review here: https://dura-dundee.org.uk/2023/09/26/the-water-all-around-us