BERNADETTE MCBRIDE

Bernadette McBride is an award-winning writer, film director, and academic. She is the author of the short story collection Birds Are Liars (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025). Her short story For the Man Who Died in the Wood was shortlisted for the 2020 Manchester Fiction Prize; her short story Sea Monster was adapted into an award-winning Irish-language short film selected for ten international film festivals. Her work has also appeared in a range of anthologies and academic journals.

 

She is currently working on Dark Bay, a book that brings together memoir and nature writing in the form of an open address to her mother. Drawing on the history of England’s largest lost lake in West Lancashire, it explores intergenerational trauma, care experience, and the ways personal and natural histories shape one another.

 

Bernadette is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Liverpool Hope University, where she teaches prose fiction, creative non-fiction, and scriptwriting. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Liverpool. In 2019, she received the Liverpool Guild Award for Biggest Impact on the City of Liverpool for her community writing work. She lives in Liverpool with her two children.