Manda Scott is a novelist, podcaster and teacher whose work connects narrative, systemic change and long-term ecological thinking. She trained and worked as a veterinary surgeon before turning to writing. Her debut novel, Hen’s Teeth, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize; later work was shortlisted for the Edgar and the Saltire Award and won the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish crime fiction.

She is best known for the Boudica: Dreaming quartet, four novels set in pre-Roman Britain that reconstruct a culture organised around reciprocity with the living world rather than extraction from it. The same concern runs through her later fiction, including A Treachery of Spies, named by The Times as one of the ten best thrillers of its decade.

Her more recent direction followed a Masters in Regenerative Economics at Schumacher College. Out of that came Accidental Gods, a podcast and membership programme that gives sustained airtime to people building the structural alternatives already taking shape: governance experiments, regenerative agriculture, monetary redesign, ecological restoration. With her wife Faith Tilleray she also co-created the Thrutopia Masterclass, a course for writers built on a specific diagnosis: dystopia rehearses collapse and utopia is not credible, so what is missing is the narrative of the transition itself, the plausible route from here to a future worth inheriting. She has taught contemporary shamanic practice for four decades and runs the Dreaming Awake practitioner training with Louise Mayor.

Her sixteenth novel, Any Human Power, applies that principle to her own fiction. It is a political thriller that maps workable paths through institutional breakdown rather than depicting its aftermath, and it has been described by Lee Child as immersive, strange and humane in equal measure. She is currently writing the sequel, and lives on a smallholding on the border between England and Wales.

Links: mandascott.co.uk, accidentalgods.life, thrutopia.life, narrativeark.net