Profile

Allan Radcliffe is the author of The Old Haunts (2023) and Blurred Faces (2025).

Allan was born in Perth, Scotland, and now lives near Edinburgh. His debut novel The Old Haunts was shortlisted for Scotland’s National Book Awards and for the McKitterick Prize, and was adapted as a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime. His short stories have been published in anthologies including Out There, The Best Gay Short Stories and New Writing Scotland. With an MA from the University of Glasgow, he works as an arts journalist and theatre critic. His writing has won the Allen Wright Award and the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award.

Below is a short Q&A with Allan Radcliffe:

How did you start writing, and what does writing mean to you?

I started writing not long after I began reading in earnest. At first, I modelled my writing on whatever I was reading at any given moment, so I wrote and illustrated my own comic then graduated to writing adventure stories and whodunnits. It wasn’t until much later on that I became conscious of writing as a means of making sense of the world, developing my own voice, and describing people and events that generally speaking weren’t widely represented in the books I was reading.

What’s your favourite book and who is your favourite author?

If I had to choose one, it would be The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark.

Do you have a writer’s habit that helps you ‘get in the zone’?

I try to prepare a few lines of prose or dialogue in my head to get me going when I sit down to write, rather than coming to the page cold. It’s good to have some semblance of a plan. I’ve been a journalist for twenty years, and, looking back, I can always tell the articles I’ve written quickly, with energy and a plan in mind, and the ones that were more like pulling teeth.

Photo credit: Ditte Sulgaard Dunne