Marianne Pickles is a prize-winning author who’s always been curious about the future. The whole world is an unfolding story and she wants to read ahead to find out how it ends. As a child, when she learned the sun will die one day, she felt disappointed she won’t be there to see it. But having grown up in the northeast of Scotland means she knows just how cold it’ll be!
Aged seven, Marianne used her parents’ Amstrad computer to type out a story she’d written. Filling the screen with shiny green letters was the perfect union of high technology and magic. The mesmerising green and black patterns created their very own universe. It was like seeing the matrix, years before the film hit our screens.
As a writer and former teacher, Marianne thinks writing is one of the greatest inventions in human history. It allows us to read the thoughts of other people, no matter how far apart we are in space or time, transforming us all into telepaths and time travellers. Necromancers, too, but without the mess.
Marianne Pickles writes stories that explore the implications of new technologies through mysterious plots and curious characters, set in a future where the climate crisis is history. She lives in Ely, on the only hill in Cambridgeshire.
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Cover photo by Adobe Firefly