Carys Davies

Carys Davies is a novelist and short story writer based in Edinburgh. Her short story collection The Redemption of Galen Pike won The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize.  Her debut novel, West, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, longlisted for the Europese Literatuurprijs and winner of the Wales Book of the Year for Fiction. Her second, The Mission House, was The Sunday Times 2020 Novel of the Year. Her third, Clear, published in 2024, won the 2025 RSL Ondaatje Prize and has been nominated for several others, including the Walter Scott Prize, the Winston Graham Prize, Scotland’s National Book Award and the Wales Book of the Year. She has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

At the Institute Davies will be working on a new historical novel, set in 1870s Stonington, Connecticut and the Antarctic. It’s the story of a commercial sea voyage, a hunt, and she will be thinking about love and family, profit and power and authority, and how those things complicate each other. The cold desert at the bottom of the world has fascinated Carys for most of her life, and this novel will be a new way of exploring that most Antarctic of tensions: spaces that are both claustrophobic and brimming with the inner lives of humans, and at the same time almost impossibly vast and open.