About Elizabeth Stott

I am a writer based in Cumbria – a rural county in North West England – where I have lived for over 25 years. I am lucky to have a large and unruly garden, where the territory is marked out by blackbirds and robins. I love to be in the garden as the sun sets across the Derwent Valley and observe the transitional time between swallow-swoop and bat-flight.

As a child, I was a fan of comics and Blyton, moving on to science fiction and Jackie magazine with equal enthusiasm. Haunting the library, I read all the ‘space’ science books I could lay my hands on.  In those days, it generally meant Patrick Moore or Carl Sagan. I loved to write stories and draw, and was torn between a career in art or science, but decided I was better at the science, so studied physics at university. I worked in industry after graduating, before taking time out to have a family. That’s when I started writing, exploring fiction and, later, poetry. I have published short stories and poetry in various places, and have collections of both. Familiar Possessions contained some of my earliest short stories, some of which have been published elsewhere, and within this blog. My poetry pamphlet, The Undoing, was published by Maytree Press in 2023.

I write in many genres and try not to be bound by classification and form. I still enjoy reading about science. My  particular interests are in cosmology and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence – a subject that has fascinated me since girlhood. It seems to me that finding fictional characters in strange places has something in common with finding aliens, and the ever-stranger boundaries between humans and machines.

See my page ‘News and Publications’ for up-to-date information. ‘Fiction Links; has links to work contained within this blog.