Welcome to my website. I’m Helen Sedgwick, and I’m a multi-genre author of literary fiction, science fiction and crime. I write about human connection across time and space, juxtaposing science with the supernatural and realism with ghost story.
My debut, The Comet Seekers (Harvill Secker 2016), was selected as a best book of 2016 by The Herald and Glamour. The novel opens with two strangers meeting in Antarctica as a comet fractures overhead, then loops back over a thousand years to ask what happened in their lives and the lives of their ancestors.
The Growing Season (Harvill Secker 2017) was shortlisted for Scotland’s National Book Awards: Fiction Book of the Year. Set in an alternate realty where artificial wombs have become the norm, the novel explores what happens when biotechnology meets the human body, the future of reproduction, the commodification of medicine, and our potential for equality.
My crime trilogy, The Burrowhead Mysteries, is When The Dead Come Calling (Point Blank 2020), Where The Missing Gather (2021), and What Doesn’t Break Us (2022). Part folk horror and part police procedural, the trilogy follows the inhabitants of a remote village as prejudice intersects with the uncertainty of memory and belief to create a haunted, politically contemporary narrative.
Before I became a writer I worked as a research scientist, first as a physicist (I have a PhD in soft condensed matter physics from Edinburgh University) and then as a bio-engineer.
I’m also a literary editor. I founded Wildland Literary Editors in 2012, and I was the managing director of Cargo Publishing and managing editor of Gutter.
In 2021 I was awarded the Dr Gavin Wallace Fellowship, for which I’m writing a sci-fi series set on four planets attempting to rebuild after environmental crisis. I’m represented by Cathryn Summerhayes of Curtis Brown.