HOT KITCHEN SNOW has just been longlisted for the prestigious Edge Hill Prize 2011
Susannah Rickards grew up in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She read English at Oxford, trained for the theatre in Paris and then spent ten years in classical and improvisational theatre, touring the world with baskets of corsets and swords in ever-dodgier vehicles. She enjoyed the quirkiness of touring - playing Hamlet at Regent's Park vast open air theatre one night and in the gallery shop on the Isle of Skye two nights later with cheerful quilts for sale in the background instead of battlements. Touring from the drought-stricken Kenyan/Somali borders to war-torn Beirut, throughout Europe and the UK she worked as an actress until she was cast in Northern stage's production of Stars in the Morning Sky, co-directed by Lev Dodin of the Maly Theatre in St Petersburg, a man so charismatic that every actor in the cast turned up for rehearsal one day and ran their scenes for theree hours whilst waiting for him to turn up, before realising it was Sunday - our day off.
He set the cast a task of writing a story about their character prior to their appearance on stage and she realised immediately she was in the wrong job. When the show ended, she moved to East London and studied writing with novelists Alison Fell and Kathy Page, funding winter writing by guiding American high school students round Europe in the summer months. The first story she wrote was shortlisted for the Ian St James Awards but she soon learned it's not always that simple. Since then her short fiction and poetry have been published, anthologised, broadcast on radio and online in the UK, USA, Canada and on BBC World service, most recently in issues 4 & 5 of The Yellow Room, in The New Writer and Glasshouse books anthology of London stories, one from each borough, in 33:East. She's picked up a number of local, national and international awards for her work including the Eastside Books New Writing Bursary and Commonwealth Broadcasting Short Story Prize.
In January 2000 she was awarded a Hawthornden Writing Fellowship and was Writer-in-Residence at Middlesex University from 2000-2002. When her twin sons were born she moved from central London to a Surrey village and stopped writing for five years but returned to it in 2008, literally running home from dropping the boys on their first day at school, straight to the computer. In 2008 she won the Conan Doyle New Fiction Award. Recently she has been shortlisted for the Cinnamon New Novel Award, highly commended in the 2010 Society of Authors' Olive Cooke Award and shortlisted for BBC Radio 4's Opening Lines. Online she is a member of Write Words, the critical forum The Writers' Round Table and blogs from time to time with Strictly Writing. She's been married to writer and arts' documentary maker Simon Cherry for fifteen years and they live with their twin sons and a swiftly expanding menagerie in a house overlooking farmland and woods. After a lifetime in terraced housing she still gets a thrill spotting wild deer, green woodpeckers and parakeets from her kitchen window. She works part time as an events manager for a catering company and teaches creative writing locally. She'd like to pretend her spare time is spent bagging Munroes and swimming in lakes but an indecent amount of it is squandered having tickle tournaments with her kids, passing notes to her mates during village fete committee meetings and losing at Mah-jong solitaire.
