Governor General’s Literary Award winner, Kate Pullinger, writes for both print and digital platforms. Her new novel, Forest Green, a story about a logger who works in the forests of British Columbia, came out in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook formats in August 2020, and is now in paperback. In May 2021 Pullinger won the Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award, given every year by the Electronic Literature Organisation.
Pullinger’s most recent digital fiction, Breathe, a ghost story that knows where you are, is available for free on your phone. It was shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize in 2019.
In 2009 Pullinger’s novel The Mistress of Nothing won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, one of Canada’s most prestigious literary prizes. It was also longlisted for the Giller Prize. Her prize-winning digital fiction projects, including Inanimate Alice, have reached audiences around the world. In 2014 Pullinger was awarded the Anne Green Award at Wordfest, Canada.
Kate is Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University where she is also Director of the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries. She is currently the academic lead on Amplified Publishing, a project looking at the future of publishing across multiple sectors including books, video, games, magazines, audio, etc.
Kate’s novel Landing Gear was published in 2014. Landing Gear takes the story told in Pullinger’s collaborative multimedia digital work, co-created with Chris Joseph, Flight Paths: A Networked Novel, and develops it further. Also in 2014, Pullinger collaborated with novelist and theatre-maker Neil Bartlett to create the digital war memorial, Letter to an Unknown Soldier. Commissioned by 14-18 NOW to mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War One and inspired by the statue of the unknown soldier on Platform One of Paddington Train Station in London, this project inspired 22,000 people to write letters to the unknown soldier. A selection of these letters was published in a book of the same name.
As well as Landing Gear and The Mistress of Nothing, Kate Pullinger’s books include A Little Stranger, Weird Sister, The Last Time I Saw Jane, Where Does Kissing End?, which were all published in new ebook editions in the spring of 2014.
Other projects include a libretto based on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey, commissioned by the Slovak National Theatre in collaboration with the composer Lubica Cekovska. This work was premiered in Bratislava in November 2013 and well reviewed in the German, Austrian, and American press, including a good review in The New York Times. Kate Pullinger gives talks and readings frequently.
Kate Pullinger was born in Cranbrook, British Columbia, and went to high school on Vancouver Island. She dropped out of McGill University, Montreal, after a year and a half of not studying philosophy and literature, then spent a year working in a copper mine in the Yukon, northern Canada, where she crushed rocks and saved money. She spent that money travelling and ended up in London, England, where she has been ever since. She is married and has two children.