Sarah Jane Butler
Sarah Jane Butler wanted to be a cowboy when she grew up but it wasn’t on the careers list. So she studied French and Spanish, scrubbed public toilets, programmed computers, became a book editor and began to write, specialising in disability and the voluntary sector. Her first published short story, The Swimmer, was included in Best British Short Stories 2011 and others have appeared in Litro, Unthology and elsewhere. She won the 26 Project Award twice for her poems and has performed her work in lightships, festival tents and pubs.
Her first novel, Starling, was published by Fairlight in 2022. All this time, she was roaming the Sussex countryside, poking in ditches, swimming in rivers and lying in the long grass listening, slowly learning about the wild world around her. She helps run her local wildlife group and co-founded Ripple Effect, a citizen science project working with the University of Sussex to protect the health of the Upper Medway. She is currently working on a non-fiction project exploring the human relationship with rivers, past, present and future, in the UK and overseas, for publication in 2027.