Sharon Blackie spent several years as an academic neuroscientist specialising in the field of anxiety and panic, and working at the Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris and the Institute of Neurology in London. After a few twists and turns, armed with qualifications in psychology and creative writing, she later moved to a croft in the north-west Highlands of Scotland and practiced as a psychologist specialising in narrative psychology, myth- and storytelling. In 2006 Sharon and her husband David Knowles founded literary publisher Two Ravens Press (http://www.tworavenspress.com) and in 2012 she founded EarthLines magazine (http://www.earthlines.org.uk), a full-colour quarterly print publication for writing about nature, place and the environment. Sharon’s first novel The Long Delirious Burning Blue was described by The Independent on Sunday as ‘Hugely potent. A tribute to the art of storytelling that is itself an affecting and inspiring story’ and by The Scotsman as ‘… powerful (reminiscent of The English Patient), filmic, and achieving the kind of symmetry that novels often aspire to, but rarely reach.’ She is still working on her second novel, The Bee Dancer (written with the support of a bursary from the Scottish Arts Council), a contemporary ecological retelling of the myth of Psyche and Eros. She now lives on and works a croft sandwiched between mountains and sea on the far south-western coast of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.
To contact Sharon, send an email to sharon[at]reenchantingtheearth[dot]com
Books
The Long Delirious Burning Blue: a novel by Sharon Blackie
Cleave: New Writing by Women in Scotland edited by Sharon Blackie
Riptide: New Writing From the Highlands & Islands edited by Sharon Blackie & David Knowles
Entanglements: New ecopoetry edited by David Knowles & Sharon Blackie
The Sam Book by Raymond Federman, translated from the French by Sharon Blackie
Articles (a selection)
Re-storying the Earth: Listening to the Land’s Dreaming EarthLines magazine Issue 1, May 2012. Read the article in full here: http://www.earthlines.org.uk/Assets/Text,%20pdfs/BlackieHirons.pdf
Digging In and Digging Deep: Place, Belonging and Responsibility EarthLines Magazine Issue 4 (February 2013) Read the article in full here: http://www.earthlines.org.uk/Assets/Text,%20pdfs/DiggingIn%20Digging%20Deep.pdf
Here Waterlog, Summer 2008
The Changing Face of Crofting Country Smallholding July 2006
The Transformational Power of Literature, The View From Here magazine
