Eley Williams


Eley Williams is a British writer. Her debut collection of prose, Attrib. and Other Stories, was awarded the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize 2018. With writing anthologised in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, Liberating the Canon and Not Here: A Queer Anthology of Loneliness, she is an alumna of the MacDowell Colony and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She teaches at Royal Holloway, University of London, and supervises Jungftak, a journal for contemporary prose poetry.
Her first novel, The Liar's Dictionary, was published in 2020, described in The Guardian as a "virtuoso performance full of charm... a glorious novel – a perfectly crafted investigation of our ability to define words and their power to define us". Stuart Kelly in a review in The Spectator wrote of the book: "It deals with love as something which cannot be put into words, and dare not speak its name. It is, in short, a delight."

Awards