Bibliothèque des Refusés

Author Bio v.1 (446 words, 2,801 characters)

Susan Maxwell is an independent author and scholar who writes literary/slipstream fiction for adults and fantasy literature suitable for younger readers. She has published four novels and a collection of short stories, with short stories and poetry also appearing in magazines and anthologies. 

Maxwell’s short story 'Necrologue' was the title story of the 2004 Lambda Award-winning anthology edited by H. Sandler, and her first published novel Good Red Herring (Little Island) was included in the Irish Times Best books of 2014 for children and young adults. 

Born near Tullamore in Ireland, Maxwell has fitted her writing activities around work as a professional archivist that took her to Dublin, Belfast, London, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, The Hague, and most recently back to Ireland in 2015. 

She studied English Literature and History for her BA from NUIG, before going on to postgraduate study in Archives at UCD. She returned to the books later, combining study with full-time work (and novel-writing), and gained a PhD from Northumbria University for her research on archives and the margins.

In 2014 Little Island Books published the novel Good Red Herring for the Young Adult market, though as with most of Maxwell's work, it does not fit entirely comfortably into generic or age-related categories. The book is set in a fictional low-fantasy world that is both imaginary and deeply rooted in Ireland.

Further, independently published, books followed this debut. A Wild Goose Hunt is the second in the Muinbeo Chronicles series inaugurated by Good Red Herring. A new series, Flux Avellana, was launched with And the Wildness, set in the same overarching 'Hibernia Altera' universe. The short story collection Fluctuation in Disorder and the novel Hollowmen are both slipstream works aimed at an adult rather than a universal readership. 

As well as fiction, Maxwell writes academic / non-fiction material on themes related to archives and literature; her chapter on the archival aspects of the short stories of M.R. James and of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, based on a paper given at the 2022 conference ‘The Past as Nightmare’, is included in a forthcoming volume from Routledge.

Maxwell has served on fiction and non-fiction juries for the British Fantasy Awards and reviews regularly for Inis, the magazine of Children’s Books Ireland. Literary influences come mostly from speculative and modernist fiction, the author being particularly fond of Flann O'Brien, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, and Virginia Woolf. 

Maxwell is also an artist who has exhibited her work in various venues in Ireland and Britain. When not writing, or painting, or being an archivist, she can be found in the vegetable patch, listening to music, reading books, watching old detective series, or catching up on sleep.