Ian Critchley has written for the Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Times Literary Supplement and Literary Review on subjects such as creativity, genius, evolutionary biology, and pandas.
As an editor he has worked with many authors across a wide range of fiction and non-fiction titles. He copy edited the 2018 Booker Prize winner, Milkman, by Anna Burns, and Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. He co-edited the first of the annual May Anthologies, which have launched the careers of, among others, Zadie Smith and Peter Ho Davies.
His story ‘Ghost Walks’, originally published by The Fiction Desk, was selected for the 2025 edition of Best British Short Stories (Salt Books). ‘A New New Forest’ was published alongside fiction by Jonathan Coe, Margaret Drabble and Robert Edric in Neonlit: Time Out Book of New Writing, volume 2 (Quartet Books). Other stories have appeared in, among others, The Mechanics’ Institute Review, Structo, Lighthouse and Litro. ‘Removals’ is published as a signed limited-edition chapbook by Nightjar Press.
He won the 2022 Hammond House International Literary Prize and the 2021 HISSAC short story award, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Plaza Prize, 2022 Exeter Story Prize and the 2020 H.G. Wells Short Story Competition, appearing in the prize anthology Vision.
A graduate of the prestigious ‘Writing a Novel’ course at the Faber Academy, he lives in Hertfordshire with his wife, two children and a cat with very muddy paws. Most days he can be found on Bluesky (@iancritchley.bsky.social).
Ian Critchley 