writer & translator

“Equally at home with the weird and the everyday, McQuade is a singular talent worth seeking out.”
The Herald

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PAUL MCQUADE

Paul McQuade is an award-winning writer and translator originally from Glasgow, Scotland. Since leaving Glasgow he has spent time in Edinburgh, Tokyo, New York, and Paris. He is currently somewhere in-between. He has been shortlisted for The White Review and Bridport prizes for short fiction and the Anne Brown prize for nonfiction. He was the recipient of the Sceptre Prize for New Writing 2014, the Austrian Cultural Forum Writing Prize 2017, and the Cymera Prize for Speculative Short Fiction 2024.

His debut story collection, Between Tongues, was published in 2021 by Cōnfingō. He is the author of Hometown Tales: Glasgow, with Kirsty Logan, part of Weidenfeld & Nicolson’s series championing writing from and about diverse regions across the U.K.

He is represented by Johnson & Alcock.

 

Books

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Between Tongues (Short Stories)

Where does one language end and another begin? What happens to those people who find themselves not simply between languages but in states of transformation and translation? How do we speak, act, and live in these spaces where everything seems at once both promised and impossible?

Paul McQuade’s debut short story collection moves into this space between tongues – a play on the Scottish Gaelic word for translation, eadar-theangachadh. These stories span modern myth and the surreal, Europe, Asia, and North America, and take language and technology to their limit to map those strange places where people without voices find themselves.

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Carpe Noctem

Night transforms the world. Owls and bats claim the sky from songbirds, nocturnal predators prowl beneath cover of darkness, and cloying shadows grow thick enough to swallow a scream. As the saying goes: people aren’t truly afraid of the dark—they fear what could be in the darkness with them.

Best of British Short Stories 2022

The nation’s favourite annual guide to the short story. This critically acclaimed series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor’s brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, newspapers and web sites, looking for the best of the bunch to reprint all in one volume.

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New Writing Scotland #40: nobody remembers the birdman

New Writing Scotland is the principal forum for poetry and short fiction in Scotland today. Every year it publishes the very best from both emerging and established writers, and lists many of the leading literary lights of Scotland among its past (and present) contributors.

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Between Tongues

Paul McQuade’s debut short story collection moves into this space between tongues – a play on the Scottish Gaelic word for translation, eadar-theangachadh. These stories span modern myth and the surreal, Europe, Asia, and North America, and take language and technology to their limit to map those strange places where people without voices find themselves.

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Hometown Tales: Glasgow

In these pages on Glasgow, you’ll find two unique memoirs. ‘The Old Asylum in the Woods’ is an intimate account of growing up in the shadow of Woodilee Hospital by author of The Gracekeepers and The Gloaming, Kirsty Logan. ‘A Glasgow Sang’ is a deeply personal journey on foot through the city, from Kelvin Way Bridge to George Square to the statue of La Pasionaria, by Paul McQuade

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The Best of British Fantasy 2018

The Best of British Fantasy contains over twenty brilliant stories of the strange and fantastic. These stories range from traditional sword and sorcery to contemporary fantasy, written by a mix of established fantasy authors, new voices, and even those who are not usually associated with genre fiction. It comes packed with mermaids, impossible quizzes, sorcerous rogues, magic swords, towering monsters, ghostly lovers, unreachable islands, numerous apocalypses, a particularly irritating local councillor, and bees.

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Best British Short Stories 2019

This new series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor’s brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, newspapers and web sites, looking for the best of the bunch to reprint all in one volume.

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Haunted Voices: An Anthology of Gothic Storytelling from Scotland

Haunted Voices – a bold and ambitious anthology in both text and audio – showcases some of Scotland’s best oral storytellers, from archived stories of past masters to the work of contemporary performers, and their most disturbing tales of terror.

Expect monstrous tongue-eaters, shadowy demons, haunted video tapes, wicked priests, strange shapes in the darkness, a retelling of Poe’s The Raven… and more!

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Trauma: Essays on Art and Mental Health

Trauma: Writing about art and mental health will include contributions from a range of well respected authors, such as Neil Griffiths, Kirsty Logan & Paul McQuade, Sophie Mackintosh, Rhiannon L Cosslett, Monique Roffey, Alex Pheby, Marina Benjamin, Juliet Jacques, Tamim Sadikali and the film-maker David Lynch. The essays will range from the personal to the political, from the raw to the reflective, exploring topics such as grief, insomnia, anxiety, schizophrenia, meditation, abusive relationships, work, and the relationship between madness and creativity.

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Out There: An Anthology of Scottish LGBT Writing

In the year that Scotland voted on independence from the rest of the UK, Zoe Strachan edited a definitive anthology of prose writing from Scotland's leading and emerging LGBTQ+ writers, including the likes of Ali Smith, Louise Welsh, Jackie Kay, Ronald Frame, Toni Davidson and many others. Paul McQuade contributes ‘Per Aspera ad Astra’.

 

Awards

Cymera prize for Speculative short fiction

Winner. 2024. Awarded for the short story, ‘Forgetting is Their Word for Death’, published in SF Caledonia.

Anne Brown Essay Prize

Shortlist. 2023. Special commendation for the essay, ‘A Seed’.

Austrian Cultural Forum Writing Prize

Winner. 2017. Awarded for the story, ‘The Wound in the Air,’ published in Structo #18.

Bridport short story Prize

2015. Shortlisted for the short story, ‘The Ends of the Earth’, published in Between Tongues.

Master’s Review Short Story Competition

Winner. 2014. Awarded for the story, ‘In Ribbons,’ published in Between Tongues.

White review short story prize

2014. Shortlisted for the short story, ‘Les Archives du Cœur’, published in Between Tongues.

Sceptre Prize for New Writing

Winner. 2014. Awarded for unpublished novel manuscript.

Publications

 
 

“An Inheritance”. Pank. No. 11.

“Architecture”. Specter Magazine.

“Beneath the Atlas”. Little Fiction.

“Beneath the Skin”. Gutter. No. 9.

“Imitobuwōru”. Here and There: The Life of a Global Citizen.

“In Ribbons”. The Master’s Review.

“Kamigoe”. Pulp Metal Magazine.

“Les Archives du Coeur”. The White Review.

“Per Aspera ad Astra”. Out There: An Anthology of Scottish LGBT Writing.

“Starchildren”. The Queen’s Head.

“This Impossible Flesh”. Cultural commission for LGBT History Month Scotland 2009.

“Tongue-Strabush (A Personal Dictionary)”. Minor Literatures.

“What Passes in the Wake”. The Island Review

“Hadean”. Numero Cinq Magazine.

 
 

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