Eley Williams Add a review

Eleanor Williams is a British writer. Her debut collection of prose, Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx Press, 2017), was awarded the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize and the 2017 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her writing has also been anthologised in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story (Penguin Classics, 2018), Liberating the Canon (Dostoevsky Wannabe, 2018) and Not Here: A Queer Anthology of Loneliness (Pilot Press, 2017).

Williams is an alumna of the MacDowell Workshop and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She taught at Royal Holloway, University of London, and supervises Jungftak, a journal for contemporary prose poetry.

Her first novel, The Liar's Dictionary, was published in 2020, described in The Guardian as a "virtuoso performance full of charm... a glorious novel – a perfectly crafted investigation of our ability to define words and their power to define us." Stuart Kelly in a review in The Spectator wrote of the book: "It deals with love as something which cannot be put into words, and dare not speak its name (done neither stridently nor sentimentally). It is, in short, a delight."

Williams's stories "Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good" (2018) and "Moonlighting" (2019) have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 under the Short Works strand, and her story "Scrimshaw" was a finalist for the 2020 BBC National Short Story Award. A 10-part radio series Gambits, based around the theme of chess, was broadcast on Radio 4 beginning in November 2021.