Victoria MacKenzie moved from Brighton to Scotland in 2007 to pursue an MLitt in Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews, before completing a PhD which examined how contemporary poets engage with science.

Writing prizes include the Robert McLellan Poetry Award and the Ruth Rendell Short Story Prize, and her work is published in many magazines and anthologies, includingGutter, Magma and the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine Anthology.

Her first novel, Brantwood, based on several years in the life of Victorian thinker John Ruskin, is well underway. For this work she was awarded an Emerging Scottish Writer Residency at Cove Park in 2014 and a Bridge Award from Moniack Mhor in 2015, which gave her retreat time and mentoring from Janice Galloway.

In 2016 a short story ‘Crex Crex’ will be published in The Book of Iona (Birlinn). She will use the New Writer Award to focus on her first short story collection, Creaturely, which explores our relationships with other species.