Congratulations on winning Zealous Stories: Short Story! Fairy Words, is a story about an obsessive collector of words. Could you tell us more about this work and what inspired it?
I grew up speaking Scots and English, so have always been intrigued by different words and their meanings. I’m also a Gaelic learner and so ‘collect’ Gaelic words as a step towards fluency! The thing that draws to me Gaelic as an outdoors lover is how intertwined the Gaelic language is with landscape. There are over fifty different words for ‘hill’ for example. One day I started daydreaming about words the fairies might leave behind, and how discovering these words might lead to the discovery of fantastical fairy lands, and from there Fairy Words started taking shape.