Ruth Thomas is a novelist and short story writer and has held posts as a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow and as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at St Andrews University. Her first novel, Things to Make and Mend (Faber, 2007) won a Good Housekeeping 'Most Entertaining Read' Award, and her most recent, The Snow and the Works on the Northern Line (Sandstone, 2021) was broadcast as a BBC R4 Book at Bedtime. Ruth's writing has won or been shortlisted for various awards in the UK including the John Llewellyn Rhys Award, the Saltire Society First Book Award and the VS Pritchett Prize and longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize. Commenting on Ruth's third story collection the novelist Ali Smith wrote: 'It is to some extent a comic universe, to a larger extent an existential one according to Thomas', and comedy, tragicomedy and existentialism remain central preoccupations in her work.