How to Get Published – Edinburgh 2023

Louise Welsh works in several forms including novels, short stories, opera libretti, radio, performance and sound art. She is the author of nine novels including The Cutting Room, The Plague Times Trilogy and The Second Cut. Louise has collaborated on four critically acclaimed operas with composer Stuart MacRae. Their latest collaboration Anthropocene, premiered to wide acclaim in 2019 and will have its German premier at Theater Bielefeld in 2023. Louise has also written for the stage, most recently King Keich (2018) inspired by Alfred Jarry’s Pere Ubu. She is editor of Yonder Awa, a poetry anthology on the theme of Scotland and the North Atlantic slave trade by Scottish and Caribbean writers (2014) and Ghost, One Hundred Stories to Read with the Lights On (2016). Louise was co-founder and director (with Jude Barber, Collective Architecture) of the Empire Café (2014) an award winning multi-disciplinary exploration of Scotland’s relationship with the North Atlantic slave trade. Louise has received numerous awards and international fellowships, including a Doctor of Arts from the Open University and an honorary fellowship from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. She was University of Otago Scottish Writers’ Fellow, New Zealand (2016). Louise is Professor of Creative Writing at University of Glasgow and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. 

Ely Percy is an award winning Scottish writer, perhaps best known for their novel Duck Feet.

Their first publication was a letter-cum-poem in Big! magazine in 1994. Since then, they’ve released a memoir Cracked: Recovering After Traumatic Brain Injury, graduated with distinction from Glasgow University’s MPhil in Creative Writing and contributed over fifty short stories to literary journals including New Writing Scotland, Scotsman, Orange and Edinburgh Review. 

Percy’s debut novel Vicky Romeo Plus Joolz was published in March 2019 by Knight Errant Press. Their second novel Duck Feet came out on March 2021 and won The Saltire Society's Scottish Fiction Book of the Year in November of the same year.

Rachelle Atalla is a Scottish-Egyptian novelist, short story writer and screenwriter based in Glasgow. Her debut novel The Pharmacist was published by Hodder & Stoughton in May 2022, with her second novel Livestock scheduled for the following year. Her short stories have been published widely in literary anthologies; she is the recipient of a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and co-edits New Writing Scotland.

In film and television, Rachelle’s first short film screenplay Trifle was commissioned by the Scottish Film & Talent Network and is currently enjoying a successful festival run, including being officially selected for the LA International Short Film Festival. Rachelle has a four-part mini-drama in development with Hopscotch Films, and most recently she has been selected to participate in the 2021 Young Films Foundation Skye residency programme, developing her first feature length screenplay with BBC Films.

Caro Clarke is a literary agent with over ten years' experience in publishing – at Transworld (PRH) and at Canongate Books as a Senior Rights Manager. They were named Rights Professional of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2021.

In 2019, they co-founded the Nan Shepherd Prize for underrepresented nature writers, which kickstarted a passion to demystify the publishing industry and help emerging writers to develop their craft and build their writing careers. Portobello Literary was established in 2022 to build on that work.

Lina Langlee (The North Literary Agency) is from Sweden but moved to Scotland in 2008. After working in publishing for a number of years, she became a literary agent in 2018. She was shortlisted for the RNA ‘Agent of the Year’ award in 2019 and 2020.

Lina is looking for books across genres: commercial fiction with a great hook, accessible literary fiction, speculative or high concept books that remain very readable, crime fiction that stands out, fun and moving Middle Grade, and ‘big emotion’ Young Adult. Across genres/age ranges, she prefers books that are fun and uplifting. In terms of non-fiction, Lina is interested either in ‘the small made big’ or ‘the big made small’: specialists that can make really niche subjects accessible and interesting to a wider market, or deeply personal accounts of the big issues we might all one day tackle.

Laura Jones is the co-founder and Publisher at the award-winning 404 Ink and also works as a book production freelancer for a number of clients such as Bloomsbury, Charco Press, Cipher Press, and many more. She is on the board of network body Publishing Scotland and was recently named a 2022 Rising Star by the Bookseller.

After a master’s degree in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, Rachel Morrell worked in the magazine industry for two and a half years before joining the world of books at Black and White publishing. There she has edited Sunday Times bestsellers and is committed to finding new and diverse talent. Rachel loves poetry, literary and detective fiction and her own writing has been published in various journals, magazines and online publications. When at home Rachel explores wild swimming spots and is a dog mum to Beans (who is absolutely full of them).