Simon Sylvester is a storyteller, writer, screenwriter, filmmaker and teacher.

He’s been writing in various forms since 2008, when his first short stories were published in journals including Smoke, Gutter, Dark Mountain and New Writing Scotland. His debut novel, The Visitors, was published by Quercus in 2014, won the Guardian Not The Booker prize and the Book Box prize, was Book Of The Month for Waterstones Scotland and reached the annual round-ups for The List and The Independent. He has appeared at Edinburgh International Book Festival, headlined spoken word events for Bad Language and Verbalise, and was commissioned by Verbose to write and perform site-specific work at Chetham’s Library, Manchester. His flash fiction has been read on BBC6 Music by Cerys Matthews. He’s written everything from pub quizzes to prize-winning poems.

Simon works freelance as a documentary video editor and contributes across production as a screenwriter, script editor and producer. As a screenwriter Simon studied the John Yorke Advanced Story Structure course. As well as placing or winning multiple competitions, his short horror Maggie (directed by James Kennedy) has screened at scores of festivals and won awards worldwide.

Simon is in the early days of performance storytelling, having found a home in traditional stories.

He lives in Cumbria with the painter Monica Metsers, their two children and a demented dog.