The Writer
Miriam Hastings is a novelist and short story writer. She has published fiction, poetry, literary reviews and articles, and essays on mental health.
As a child and an adolescent, she suffered from repeated bouts of ill-health which meant she had to leave school when she was fourteen. As a mature student, she achieved a BA from Middlesex Polytechnic, then an MA and PhD from the University of London where she taught for fifteen years. She has also worked in mental health, in a variety of fields. For several years she ran therapeutic creative writing groups for survivors of childhood trauma and mental distress.
She lives with a degenerative spine disease and now she can only write using voice recognition software, or a dictaphone – this makes life as an author quite a challenge.
THE WORK
Whether she is writing from the point of view of a patient in a mental hospital, as in her novel, The Minotaur Hunt, a child in foster care in her short story, ‘The Doll‘, or a minister’s daughter living on the north coast of Scotland in the early 19th century, as in her story, ‘Mermaid on Ice‘, Miriam is always concerned with portraying the experience of the outsider in society; giving a voice to the powerless and the oppressed.
Miriam Hastings, author 