Anne Goodwin writes fiction for the freedom to contradict herself and has been scribbling stories ever since she could hold a pencil. During her career as an NHS clinical psychologist her focus was on helping other people tell their neglected stories to themselves. Once her short fiction publication count had overtaken her age, her new ambition is to write and publish enough novels to equal her shoe size.

Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, about a woman who has kept her past identity a secret for thirty years, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize and won the inaugural Nottingham Writers’ Studio Book of the Year (Fiction). Her second novel, Underneath, about a man who seeks to resolve a relationship crisis by keeping a woman captive in a cellar, was published in May 2017.

Her short fiction has been published by Baltimore Review, Bridge House, Fictive Dream, MIRonline, Open Pen, The Honest Ulsterman, and many others, and placed in several competitions, including recent firsts in the Ilkley Festival and Writers’ Bureau short story competitions. Her short story collection, Becoming Someone, on the theme of identity, was published in November 2018.

Her new novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home , about a brother and sister separated for fifty years, which has been featured on BBC Radio Cumbria, is inspired by her previous incarnation as a clinical psychologist in a long-stay psychiatric hospital.

Her fiction explores themes of identity, mental health, marginalisation, attachment, gender, adolescent development, troublesome bodies and other psychological and social issues.

Anne Goodwin is also a book blogger with a special interest in fictional therapists.

Anne Goodwin’s articles have appeared in print in The Author, Writers’ Forum, Clinical Psychology Forum, Psychology of Sexualities Review and on various blogs and websites including the Counsellors Cafe magazine.

Anne juggles her sentences while walking in the Peak District, only to lose them battling the slugs in her vegetable plot. As a break from finding her own words, she is an avid reader and barely competent soprano in an all-comers choir.