Lillie Weston

Writing and English Literature - BA (Hons)

As far back as I can remember I have been a writer, fascinated by the art of crafting a fictional narrative.

It was only as I grew older, that I realised that so much of the writing I loved, relied on the truth as much as fiction. Writers such as Angela Carter and Virginia Woolf, take elements of our own world, and distort them through a mirror of the fantastical, magnifying our own flaws and foibles. Or in Woolf’s case, it is perhaps the magnifying lens, the experiments in style and form, that lead to the everyday being made fantastical.

My writing now is deeply influenced by the women writers that have come before me, and the women who are my contemporaries in literature.

My work is defined by its strong sense of place and imagery, and how it looks at the interplay of social relationships and the structures we are confined within.

This work is an extract of the short story that I wrote for my Undergraduate Major Writing Project ‘Shards of Glass’. The story chronicles the early lives of two siblings, Syd and Petal. It explores what it means to grow up while growing apart from the person you were once closest to.

Whilst difficult to classify in terms of genre, it is most closely aligned with the literary, with an underlying vein of the strange and uncanny. For much of this story, much is left up to the reader to engage with and decide upon. This aspect in particular fits in with our 21st century world where justice is decided upon with a few swipes of a finger across a phone screen.

It is, I hope, a challenging and emotionally engaging piece of writing.