The Unreliable Nature Writer

by Claire Carroll

The Unreliable Nature Writer is the eagerly-awaited debut collection of exhilarating, macabre and dreamy short stories from Claire Carroll, where she portrays an unsettlingly hot, vaguely familiar world of humans facing the strain of intimate and global anxieties – trying to live alongside new technologies, failing environments and unknowable natural crises. Delightful to read and unsettling to imagine, these are haunting stories about love, loss, strangely-exposing housing applications and cows.

Claire Carroll lives in Somerset, UK, and writes experimental fiction about the intersection of nature, technology, and desire. She is also a PhD researcher at Bath Spa and Exeter Universities, where she explores how experimental writing – particularly short stories and prose-poetry – can reimagine how humans relate to the natural and non-human world. Claire’s short stories and poetry have been published by journals including Gutter Magazine, perverse, Lunate Journal, The Oxonian Review, and Short Fiction Journal. In 2021, her short story My Brain is Boiling with Ideas was shortlisted for The White Review’s Short Story Prize, and her short story Cephalopod was the recipient of the Essex University & Short Fiction Journal Wild Writing Prize. Both pieces are included in The Unreliable Nature Writer.