Kim Sherwood

I am currently writing a trilogy of Double O novels expanding the James Bond universe for the Ian Fleming Estate and HarperCollins.

I am a Lecturer in Creative Writing. As a novelist, I contribute towards teaching creative writing and literature at postgraduate and undergraduate levels. I also supervise postgraduate dissertations, and am available as a PhD supervisor. I currently teach on the Creative Writing MSc and the English and Scottish Literature MA. Prior to joining the University of Edinburgh, I taught literature and creative writing at undergraduate level at the University of East Anglia (2014-2015); on the Critical and Creative Writing MA at the University of Sussex (2016); and co-developed a Creative Writing BA as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of the West of England (2016-2021). My debut novel, Testament (2018), was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Award, shortlisted for the Best First Novel Award, and won the Bath Novel Award and the Harper's Bazaar Big Book of the Year. In 2019, I was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. I am now writing a trilogy of Double O novels expanding the James Bond universe for the Ian Fleming Estate and HarperCollins. The first in the trilogy, Double or Nothing, was published in 2022 and the follow-up, A Spy Like Me, was published in 2024. The final instalment, Hurricane Room, will be published in 2026. My latest literary novel is A Wild & True Relation, out with Virago in 2023. The novel follows a girl who joins a smuggler's screw in eighteenth-century Devon, and explores women's writing and history in a subversive adventure story.

My debut novel, Testament (riverrun, 2018), explored the impact of the Holocaust across three generations of a Hungarian Jewish family, from 1944 to the present day. Testament was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Award, shortlisted for the Best First Novel Award, and won the Bath Novel Award and the Harper's Bazaar Big Book of the Year. In 2019, I was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. While writing Testament, I was working through questions of intergenerational trauma and grief – which manifest in my own family history – as well as interest in the archive, memory and identity, art, memorial and the city, and the ways in which we feel history in the present. The novel contributed original research to my field in its treatment of the forced labour service in Hungary. Formally, I was engaged with structure as architectural, mapping the novel on to the voids of the Jewish Museum Berlin as well as the scaffold of memory provided by questions posed to Survivors by the Hungarian Committee for Attending Deportees. I was further concerned with language and violence, point of view and tense, place, and character dynamics within families. Much of Testament was born from archival and site-based research, and you can read about this creative process in a journal article I wrote for 'Writing in Practice' Vol.5, titled 'The Facts that Engender'.

I am interested in gender and genre, subjects I explore in A Wild & True Relation, my latest literary novel (Virago, 2023) and my current series expanding the world of James Bond for the Ian Fleming estate.