This four week residency is offered to a writer based in Scotland who may not yet have published a work but demonstrates exceptional promise. It is an opportunity to develop a work in progress and to meet and work alongside established artists across all disciplines. 2015’s Scottish Emerging Writer was Martin MacInnes, whose debut novel Infinite Ground will be published by Atlantic Books in 2016. This year’s residency has been awarded to Lynsey May.

Lynsey May lives, loves and writes in Edinburgh. Her fiction has found its way into various journals and anthologies, including The Stinging Fly, Gutter and New Writing Scotland, and won her a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2013 and a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2015.

She loves reading aloud as well as writing in silence and has taken part in a whole host of events and festivals around the country, from the EIBF to Coast Word, the Dundee Literature Festival and the Edinburgh International Science Festival. Currently working on a novel, and her first foray into historical fiction, she’s revelling in the licence it’s given her to buy tons of books in the name of “research”.