About Finn Clarke
Interested in a variety of genres, I’ve had short stories published in British and North American magazines and anthologies, ranging from Big Pulp to Descant, and been shortlisted for competitions including Fish, Ways With Words, and carte blanche’s 3Macs. Val McDermid included my story on mercy killing in Britain’s Save our Short Story anthology, and other examples of my work can be found in The Danforth Review, NewCon Press’s Dark Currents, and carte blanche. Extending the form to novellas, I played with fairy-tales to produce Grim Tales of Hope, a collection in which my riff on Jack and the Beanstalk, Jerzi, was runner up in The New Writer’s annual novella competition. Novellas proved a great transition from short stories to novels, helped by what I learnt during my MA in Novel Writing from City, University of London, for which I was awarded their bursary and a distinction. Around the same time, I won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Debut Dagger for my psychological thriller, Call Time. The first of my new series, Deadbeat, was longlisted for Mslexia’s novel competition and the second, Dead Clever, was also longlisted for both Mslexia and the Exeter Novel Prize. More recently my standalone novel, Frazzlehead, reached the top 8% of Bridport novel competition. While my topics vary widely and cross genres, my key interests are different takes on reality, particularly from the point of view of ‘losers’ and the dispossessed.
In the second half of 2025, I was chuffed to be part of Dartmoor Preservation Association’s Wild Words – an eclectic gathering of writings about Dartmoor, accompanied by videos of pieces being read in situ, and culminating in November’s Wild Words magazine launch. I was scheduled to read part of my novel, For a Fistful of Dartmoor, and turned up excited, trepidatious, and unsure what to expect. What I found was a wide range of hugely talented, kind, modest people who all shared a love of this wild space on our doorstep. Story-telling, poems, songs, memoir, wiccan anecdotes, herbal recipes and novel extracts – you name it, we shared it. An evening to remember and I hope there will be more to come.
Outside of writing, past jobs include assistant psychologist and prison project worker – both of which I preferred to shelf stacking – and I currently work in adult social care. I’ve got dual British/Canadian citizenship, return to Quebec whenever I can, and currently live on the edge of Dartmoor in a community that bears only a passing resemblance to those portrayed in my books.
