Shena Mackay has created one of the most distinctive bodies of work in late-twentieth-century British fiction. Beginning at an early age, she specialized in writing about the raffish, the eccentric, and the abnormal, sometimes heightening their grotesqueness by the deadpan way in which she writes about them. Observers such as Jan Moir of The Daily Telegraph have praised the "painterly detail and precise observation that shimmer through all her short stories and novels" (28 July 1997). In Mackay's clear-sighted dissection of the characters who people her fiction, she has incurred the criticism that she dislikes people-a charge also leveled at times against American writer Flannery O'Connor. Mackay is indeed unsentimental; yet, as she told Moir, all her works address "love, obviously. Then injustice and loss. Humour, too. But I think the strongest theme is redemption. If people behave badly there is still hope for them."

She was born Shena Mackey...