Kelly Creighton is an award-winning Northern Irish author based in County Down. Her work circles questions of women, power and the institutions that try to contain them, moving between crime fiction, literary novels and poetry.

She is best known for her Belfast-set DI Harriet Sloane series, a crime sequence rooted in the moral and political tensions of Northern Ireland.

Across nine novels, including The Bones of It, Annika, State of Fear, Bright Eggs andSouls Wax Fair, her fiction explores what happens when private lives collide with public systems. The Bones of It was named the San Diego Book Review’s 2015 Book of the Year and is studied at university level.

Her short story collections, including Shades of Seattle and Bank Holiday Hurricane, bring the same sharp eye to fractured cities and uneasy relationships. Bank Holiday Hurricane was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award and longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. Her stories have appeared in journals such as Southword, The Stinging Fly and Litro, and in anthologies including Best British Short Stories and Alternative Ulster Noir.

In 2014, she founded The Incubator, a journal dedicated to contemporary Irish short fiction.

As a poet, her pamphlet Unbecoming re-examines the true crime case of Polly Bodine, continuing her interest in the stories women are punished for. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing and published in Poetry Ireland Review, The North and Under the Radar.

She holds an MA in Poetry from Queen’s University Belfast and is a member of the archival women’s poetry collective Femina Culpa.

Kelly lives with her husband, four children, three dogs and a tortoise.