Mandy Sutter

Mandy Sutter is a writer whose poetry, memoir, short and long fiction have been published by independent presses. Her first poem, about streetlamp beams pulling her parents' old car homewards, appeared in her school magazine when she was 12. She describes herself as a serial memoirist, drawing on the life she knows best and then trying to add a bit of magic.

Her books include the short story collection Bushmeat, shaped by her schooling in Nigeria, the novel Stretching It, and Ted the Shed, published by Ings Press in April 2024. That memoir grew from a blog about sharing an allotment with her father for ten years, and it is illustrated by cartoonist Janis Goodman.

On Insight Timer, Mandy teaches by reading bedtime stories, aiming to bring forgotten classics back to light. She points to the work of Aberdeenshire writer George MacDonald as an example of stories that still strike a contemporary note.

Her writing life has also included winning a top prize at a writing awards ceremony in Cardiff, a residency in Washington DC, and several years as Writer in Residence at Leeds General Infirmary, where she mentored patients and staff and wrote poems from their stories. She taught creative writing for many years and spent ten years on the Board of Ilkley Literature Festival.