Lindz McLeod

Lindz McLeod is an award-winning queer, working-class, Scottish writer and editor who dabbles in the surreal.

She was the Competition Secretary of the Edinburgh Writers’ Club from 2019-2023, and was elected as their Club President in 2023. Her work has been taught in schools and universities, made into avant-garde opera, has been displayed in the Victoria & Albert Museum in Dundee, and optioned for television. Lindz is an experienced freelance editor and writing coach for both fiction and non-fiction, as well as an accomplished workshop host. Along with her fiancée Z.K. Abraham, Lindz hosts the Cinema Worms podcast which reviews everything from blockbusters to indie screenings.

Lindz has read for various magazines and competitions including the Edinburgh Short Story Award and Edinburgh Flash Fiction award, and has also judged multiple fiction competitions. Additionally, she is a full member of the SFWA, the Scottish Writers Association, and the Federation of Writers (Scotland). She has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart prize multiple times, as well as for Best Small Fictions. She has been longlisted for the British Science Fiction Awards and published in Best British SF 2025.

In 2019, Lindz was awarded a Masters in Creative Writing from the Open University. In 2023, she began a PhD in Creative Writing with Manchester Metropolitan University—her thesis centers around vision and intimacy in literature, with a focus on broadening accessibility. She writes equally comfortably in English and Scots, and has been teaching herself Gaelic for two years. Recently, she has taken up acting. She very rarely sleeps.

In 2022, her flash story ‘Cake By The Ocean’ was nominated for the annual Best Small Fictions anthology. In 2023, her flash story ‘Upper Bout’ was longlisted for the Wigleaf Top Fifty. Her co-written story ‘Shark Facts My Grandma Told Me’ was mentioned on the Book Riot article Halloween Short Fiction: 9 Short Stories to Get You Ready for Spooky Season, where it was called “a masterclass in thriller writing — mounting tension, unabashed horror, and a killer twist at the end.” Her 2023 story “The Immortal Game”, a noir thriller told in chess moves from a real game, was voted one of the Apex Community Recommended Reads 2023, with reader Ryan Cole describing it as “one I love and think about often… captivating and fun”. Her 2024 story ‘Junior,’ about a man seeking to overcome his grief about a miscarriage by purchasing a Forever Baby, was longlisted for the British Fantasy Awards.