Newcastle-born Eliza Clark, 30, went viral on TikTok with her 2020 debut novel, Boy Parts, a violent, darkly comic thriller with a fetish photographer for an antiheroine, published by indie press Influx. By 2023 she was a scrappy outsider no longer, having moved to Faber with a second novel (Penance, presented as a true-crime story of a murder among teenagers) and scored a place on Granta’s once-in-a-decade list of 20 best fiction writers under 40. Now comes her first short story collection, She’s Always Hungry, a firecracker of a book that blends horror with speculative fiction and fantasy as it delves into themes of gender and power. She lives in south-east London.
What appeals to you about the short story?
It’s a little self-contained thing. It’s nice to give yourself space to experiment with different stuff – to have a bunch of ideas that you can explore and a bunch of worlds that you can play with. This has been the most fun I’ve had with a project because so much of it was so old, it didn’t even feel as if I’d written it. I could dramatically change and improve it, which is really satisfying.
