Victoria MacKenzie is a fiction writer, poet and essayist living on the east coast of Scotland. Her debut novel, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain (Bloomsbury, 2023), explored the lives of medieval mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. It won the Saltire First Book Award, was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and was adapted for BBC Radio 4. Her second novel, Each leaf, each curve of stem, about the Victorian art critic John Ruskin, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2026.
Victoria’s short fiction and poetry have been widely published in literary magazines including Extra Teeth, Mslexia and Gutter; in 2024 a new story, ‘Everlasting Light’, was commissioned and broadcast on Radio 4. She has been awarded a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award, the Emerging Writer Prize from Moniack Mhor/The Bridge Awards, the McLellan Poetry Award, the Ruth Rendell Short Story Prize and the Exeter Story Prize. Writing residencies include Hawthornden Castle, Cove Park, Varuna (the National Writers’ House of Australia) and Saari (Finland).
She has an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews (2008), and is particularly interested in the intersections of art and science. Her PhD (St Andrews, 2013) explored how contemporary poets write about scientific ideas, from genetics to quantum physics. She is currently writing a book in hybrid forms, Vegetal Souls, which considers the nature of plant consciousness through flash fiction, poetry and micro-essays. An excerpt from this book, ‘I Am a Plant’, was shortlisted for the inaugural Anne Brown Essay Prize. Victoria is a committed writing mentor and has been teaching creative writing for more than fifteen years.
For TLC Victoria reads Poetry, Fiction and Non-Fiction
