Brave New Words
Cymera: Scotland’s Festival of Science-Fiction, Fantasy and Horror is proud to offer a platform for emerging and newly published writers to read their work in front of our audience.
Our Brave New Words readers will appear just before some of our the events in the Theatre.
For some, this will be the first time they have read in front of an audience, so please give them a big Cymera welcome, and say hi at the signing afterwards!
E.P. van Gelder
Supporting Cosy Up with Julie Leong and Rebecca Thorne
E.P. van Gelder has worked as an animator for video games, exhibited sculptures worldwide, and sold his soul making motion graphics for corporate TV behemoths—only to reclaim it by writing books he loves.
Bronwyn Eley
Supporting Magic, Mayhem and Murder with T.L. Huchu, J.J. Marr and Emma Newman
Bronwyn grew up in Australia with a yearning to see as much of the world as possible - which explains why she now lives in Edinburgh. Her other passions include photography, travel and martial arts but her truest passion is telling stories through her writing. Her first YA fantasy series (The Relic Trilogy) was published by an Australian indie publishing house, a tale of dark magic and even darker thoughts. Book one in Bronwyn's new romantasy duology (The Rule) was published in March 2025 with Pantera Press, an adventure for anyone who has always had a thing for assassins.
Katalina Watt
Supporting Misfits and Monsters with Annabel Campbell, Genoveva Dimova and Elspeth Wilson
Katalina Watt is the author of Saltswept (2026, Hodderscape). They were selected for a 2025 Literature Matters Award from Royal Society of Literature, and AIR Literature UNESCO 2024 Writer in Residence for Konstkollektivet in Sweden. They were a finalist for 2023 Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine as founding Audio Director for khōréō.
Kate Macdonald
Supporting The Final Chapter with John Gwynne and Tasha Suri
Kate is a writer, a literary historian, a recovering publisher, an editor and a former academic and lives under the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire. Her academic research on publishing history and print culture has been published in many academic journals and books, and from 2019 her SFF short stories found publication too. She serialised her novel The Shetland Witch on Substack, gaining many enthusiastic subscribers, now available as a paperback and as an ebook. She recently edited Several Worlds, an anthology of writing by her writing group, also available in paperback and as an ebook.
Find Kate on her website, Bluesky and on Instagram.
Image credit: Louise von Funcke
M.L. Sparks
Supporting Epic Love Stories with Kate Dylan, Saara El-Arifi and L.R. Lam
Dreaming up stories since forever, M.L. Sparks spends their days hanging out with fictional characters and exploring worlds that don’t technically exist (yet). Occasionally, they see humans in their free time—usually when they are hunting for coffee or a new plot twist.
MK Hardy
Supporting Dark Traditions with Yvonne Battle-Felton and Andrew Michael Hurley
MK Hardy is the pen name for two geeky women living and writing together in Scotland. Their debut Sapphic Gothic Horror, The Needfire, comes from Solaris in the UK in July 2025. They were mentees in the Pitch Wars 2020-21 programme, and mentors for Queery Fest 2022. They are organisers and facilitators for Scotland’s Cymera Festival. They are represented by John Baker at Bell Lomax Moreton.
M. Vixen
Supporting Love and Other Disasters with Stephanie Burgis, Gabby Hutchinson Crouch and Nadia El-Fassi
Storytelling is something M. Vixen (she/they) has done since she was old enough to speak. As a child she would retell stories she had heard until she was old enough to create her own. Living in Scotland with the love of her life, her overly active imagination combined with the beauty of Scotland's wild nature now feeds her passion for romantic fantasy and her ongoing Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
Find them on TikTok, Bluesky and on Instagram.
Vanessa Santos
Supporting Dark Desires with Kat Dunn, Sarah Maria Griffin and Angie Spoto
Vanessa Santos was born and raised on a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic. She now lives in Scotland (though still by the sea) and spends as much of her time as possible devouring stories, writing stories, and wandering the endless Scottish woods. Her short fiction has been published online at Samjoko Magazine and Idle Ink, and in anthologies by Sliced Up Press, Colp, and Solar Press. MAKE A HOME OF ME is her first book.
Find Vanessa on Instagram.
Caledonia Fife
Supporting Home Sweet Home with E.M. Faulds, Stark Holborn and Gareth L. Powell
Caledonia Fife is a neurodiverse disabled queer trans writer of transgressive satirical fiction with a punk ethos - subversive, political (left), community (trans) focused, and DIY. They are an angry (and funny) rebel, and that comes through in their stories. They also (really) like parenthesis.
They can be found on Bluesky
R.M. Brown
Supporting Myth-takes and Royal Rewrites with Jean Menzies, Holly Race and A.S. Webb
Rebecca is co-founder of the charity Folklore Scotland and winner of the 2024/25 People’s Book Prize (Fiction) for her debut fantasy novel SONG OF THE STAG. Armed with an obscene number of folklore books, she strives to preserve the tales of the past for a new generation by digitising stories, recording podcasts, and of course, hunting for fairies.
Rafael Torrubia
Supporting The Good Fight with Sebastien de Castell and Cameron Johnston
Rafael Torrubia is an award-winning writer of fiction, history, and things in-between. Their writing centres folklore, queerness, protest history and community through a fantasy lens. Their debut novel The Shipwright and the Shroudweaver - out October 2025 from Gollancz - offers an epic adventure of murdered gods, apocalyptic magic, and love that can survive the end of the world. A winner of the Deirdre Roberts poetry prize, and twice shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize, Rafael has published with Poetry Scotland, the National Gallery of Scotland, Jupiter Artland, Claw & Blossom, Corvid Queen and others.
Melanie Frome
Supporting Happily Never After with Sarah Rees Brennan and Ry Herman
Melanie Frome is a Scottish author who writes fiction that asks what if?—layering magic, myth, and mayhem over the real world we think we know. Everlasting, her second novel (and first YA dark fantasy), was self-published in March 2025 after a few delays and several plot twists (in both life and manuscript). After a lifetime abroad and a lot of detours, she now calls Edinburgh home—the city of ghosts, folklore, and cobbled whispers. When not wrangling characters, she’s chasing meaning, mochas, guiding movement on the mats—and the next spark of chaos that might just turn into a story..
Find Melanie online on Instagram, her Substack, Facebook and her website.
Photcredit: Georgie Barnes
Ivy Lewis
Supporting Love Bound with Rachel Gillig, Amal El-Mohtar and Ava Reid
Ivy writes Fae-Fi, a genre-blending mix of sci-fi and folklore with romantic and dystopian elements. She’s published by Scorpius Books (Ferrishyn and Gan Dídean), an award-winning independent press and the first in the UK to publish dyslexia-friendly adult fiction.