Eley Williams

Eley Williams is a British writer born in London in 1987. She studied at Royal Holloway, University of London, and is a lecturer in creative writing. Her short story collection Attrib. and Other Stories (2017, Influx Press) won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2017 and established her as one of the most distinctive new voices in British literary fiction. Williams's stories are distinguished by their formal playfulness, their delight in language itself — its failures, its seductions, and its comedy — and their ability to find profound emotion in apparently comic premises. Her debut novel The Liar's Dictionary (2020, William Heinemann) concerns a young lexicographer and a Victorian compiler of a fictional dictionary, united by their shared secrets. She has written widely for literary magazines and anthologies and has been a judge for numerous prizes. Her work celebrates queer sensibility and the materiality of language.