Dr Lynda Clark

Contact info

lynda.clark@abertay.ac.uk

01382 308089

Biography

Lynda Clark's first novel Beyond Kidding (2019, Fairlight Books) was optioned by Film4 and is in development with Top Boy director William Stefan Smith attached. Her short story collection Dreaming in Quantum was published by Fairlight Books in 2021 and includes the highly acclaimed 'Ghillie's Mum' which won the 2018 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Europe and Canada and was shortlisted in the 2019 BBC Short Story Award. Her latest novel, Strange Talk, is forthcoming from Fairlight Books in November 2026.

Prior to joining academia, Lynda worked as a bookseller and in the videogame industry as a writer, producer and narrative designer. She grew up on a council estate and is the first (and currently remains the only) member of her extended family to attend university.

She has a PhD in interactive narrative from Nottingham Trent University and is interested in writing with and for new technologies.

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Teaching
Research

Lynda currently contributes to:

DES201 - Narrative Design

DES401 - Games, Society and Culture

She has previously taught at the University of Edinburgh:

Creative Writing: Prose

Interdisciplinary Futures

World of Story: Narrative, Creativity and the Arts

World as Story: Narrative, Self and Society

Knowledge Integration and Project Planning

And at Nottingham Trent University:

Foundations of English Literature

Interests

Lynda is primarily interested in how new technologies shape us and the world around us. This manifests in her prose, interactive narratives and videogame work. She also has a keen interest in depicting unusual and disordered voices in creative writing.

She is currently researching speaking machines and other non-human voices, memoir and representations of vocal disorder and unusual voices in popular culture for a forthcoming book with Goldsmiths Press.

Previously she has researched the effect of serialization on narrative in Victorian prose fiction and episodic videogames, interactive narratives for reflective purposes, digital preservation of interactive works, writing for and with LLMs, and text generation and generative stories.

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More Information

Esteem

In 2019, Lynda was Innovation Fellow at the British Library, working on their Emerging Formats project. Lynda's particular research strand was Interactive Narratives. She explored the effectiveness of existing archiving tools for collecting born-digital web-based works, curated a Special Collection for the UK Web Archive and produced formal reports and a creative work reflecting on the process. The creative piece, "The Memory Archivist", won the 2019 British Library Labs award for Best Creative Work Using Library Collections.

On completion of the fellowship, Lynda joined the University of Dundee's InGAME research center (in partnership with Abertay University) as Research and Development Fellow in Narrative and Play where she worked with a variety of industry and academic partners on applications of creative writing for new technologies and vice versa.

Outreach

Leadership, Management and Administrative Roles / Experience

Lynda was previously Programme Director of the Narrative Futures Programme at the University of Edinburgh, a highly interdisciplinary masters exploring narrative across forms and technologies.

Lynda is currently external examiner on the Creative Writing masters programme at De Montfort University.

Other Scholarly and Professional Activities

PhD Theses examined:

Nicole Caratas - A Land Long Forgotten: A Novel and A Balancing Act: Accuracy and Authenticity in Historical Fiction (internal examiner - University of Edinburgh)

Jussi Waltteri Nybom - Data-Driven Approaches to Narrative Personalisation through Psychologically Motivated Models (external examiner - University of the Arts London)