Ellen McWilliams

Ellen McWilliams writes non-fiction and fiction. Her work is about how we live in the shadows of the past and is especially preoccupied with the power of what the philosopher James Hollis calls ‘the ghosts who run our lives’. Her current writing is concerned with buried family histories and how landscapes conceal traumatic histories of revolution and conflict, and in particular how the unusual sunder of Civil War, what Seamus Heaney named ‘neighbourly murder’, unavoidably haunts the present.

Her writing explores the different forms of careful listening that bring hidden, intergenerational histories to the surface, histories that refuse to rest; Seamus Deane in Reading in the Dark likens these unsettling histories to ‘a shout down a tunnel that echoes and echoes and never really stops’.

https://www.ellenmcwilliams.com