Eley Williams


Eleanor Williams is a British writer. Her debut collection of prose, Attrib. and Other Stories, 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, Liberating the Canon and Not Here: A Queer Anthology of Loneliness.
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. It is, in short, a delight."
Williams's stories "Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good" and "Moonlighting" 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.

Early and personal life

Williams' given name is Eleanor; the unusual spelling of Eley came from school. She grew up with two sisters. Williams graduated from Selwyn College, Cambridge. She lives in West Oxfordshire with her wife Nell Stevens.

Awards and honours

In 2017, Williams received the Society of Authors's Writing Grant, and in 2018, she received a MacDowell Fellowship and Fellowship of Royal Society of Literature.
In 2023, Williams was named on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list, compiled every 10 years since 1983, identifying the 20 most significant British novelists aged under 40.

Selected bibliography

Novel

  • ''The Liar's Dictionary''

    Collections

  • Attrib. and Other Stories
  • Frit, poetry pamphlet
  • ''Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good''

    Short stories and essays

  • "In pursuit of the swan at Brentford Ait", essay in An Unreliable Guide to London, edited by Kit Caless and Gary Budden
  • "Of Père Lachaise, On Business", in We'll Never Have Paris, edited by Andrew Gallix
  • "To Plot, Plan, Redress", on the Rebecca Riots 1839, in Resist: Stories of Uprising
  • "Scrimshaw", story anthologised in ''Still Worlds Turning''

    External

  • on Goodreads
  • Eley Williams at The Guardian
  • at C&W
  • at Profession Writing Academy
  • Profile at Penguin Random House
  • at Granta
Category:Academics of Royal Holloway, University of London
Category:Alumni of Selwyn College, Cambridge
Category:British LGBTQ academics
Category:English LGBTQ writers
Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
Category:James Tait Black Memorial Prize recipients
Category:Living people
Category:Year of birth missing
Category:21st-century British women writers
Category:21st-century English writers