Home - Marianne Pickles

Hello and welcome to my online home! No need to take off your shoes – it’s all self-cleaning, as any good virtual lair should be.

My name’s Marianne Pickles. I’m a prize-winning author, and I’ve always been curious about the future. It’s as if the whole world is an unfolding story and I want to read ahead to find out how it ends. As a child, when I learned the sun will die one day, I felt disappointed that I won’t be there to see it. Having said that, I grew up in the northeast of Scotland, so I already know how cold it’ll be. 😉

I’ve always been into writing, but my literary career really got started at age seven when I used my parents’ Amstrad computer to type out a story I’d written. (It was actually a script for a play called The Princess and the Zombie). Filling the screen with shiny green letters felt like the perfect combination of high technology and magic. It amazed me how simple green and black patterns and shapes could create their very own universe (or Picklesverse, in my case). It was like seeing the matrix, years before the film hit our screens.

As a writer and former teacher, I can’t help thinking that 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 into telepaths and time travellers. Necromancers, too, but without the mess.

I write stories that explore the implications of new technologies through mysterious plots and curious characters, set in the near future when the climate crisis is history. I live in England on the only hill in Cambridgeshire with my partner, David.

If you’d like an exclusive (and free) short story and to be the first to hear the latest news about my work, join the Picklesverse community! The short story is available as an ebook and as a professionally narrated audiobook – I’m nice like that. 😊