Carole Morin

Carole Morin
Carole Morin author pic by Andrew Catlin
Years active	1983–present

Carole Morin is a Glasgow-born novelist who lives in Soho, London. To date she has had four novels published: Lampshades,Penniless in Park Lane,Dead Glamorous. and Spying On Strange Men

Carole Morin's fiction is critically acclaimed and has been described as 'Sylvia Plath with a sense of humour' Glasgow Herald and 'A Scottish nihilistic Catcher in the Rye' Kirkus Reviews.

Paul Golding, writing in The Sunday Times compared her favourably to Françoise Sagan, writing 'Morin exploits the same obsessively introspective, whimsically punctuated stream-of-consciousness technique, but she is a much finer plotter and a hell of a better swearer'.

Jackie McGlone of The Scotsman describes her 'wickedly entertaining pitch black novels' as being 'an ingenious blend of fact and fiction (full of epigrams and authorial apercus).’

She writes the Shallow Not Stupid column in New York Arts and Fashion magazine Hint as Vivien Lash, the name of the main character in her fourth novel Spying On Strange Men.

Carole Morin was born in Glasgow. At 16 she became a Junior Diplomat to the United States on an AFS Scholarship. She was Literary Fellow at the University of East Anglia when Lorna Sage (author of Bad Blood) was Dean She was writer-in-residence at Wormwood Scrubs prison when it was Category A. She is one of the few writers to have had weekly columns in both the right of centre Spectator and left of centre New Statesman, according to the Scotsman she is the only writer to achieve this. She has also contributed to a number of other newspapers and magazines including the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Scotsman. She writes a column on the Victoria Health website. She has lived in Kampala and Beijing and now lives in London.

Carole Morin's first impact as a writer was as a prize winner of the Bridport short story competition in 1984. John Fowles described her entry Thin White Girls as 'an intriguing blend of sophistication and innocence'. She followed this by winning the Stand short story competition in 1987, for which the judge was Angela Carter. Thin White Girls was subsequently published by Faber & Faber in their prestigious First Fictions collection along with her Stand-prize-winning short story "Hotel Summer" later republished in The Herald newspaper.

Thin White Girls, like much of Morin's subsequent fiction, is narrated by a young female with a ruthless and unusual sense of humour. 'I think about toilets a lot,' she tells us, 'and how awful it must be to be a toilet.' This leads to the narrator writing a story at school from the point of view of a toilet. 'It was one of those stories where it's about the person telling it, so everything's "I", except the "I" hasn't to be yourself, if you see what I mean.' Her teacher is angry, 'But really I know my idea was much better' she continues, 'and when I'm out of her school I'll write about toilets as much as I like.'