Gwendoline Riley

Gwendoline Riley (born 1979) is a British novelist and short story writer. She is the author of seven novels and one collection. Her novels have been awarded the Betty Trask Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. In 2026, Riley was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize.

She studied English Literature at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Career After graduating from university, Riley worked briefly as an editor for the Manchester magazine CityLife. She then worked on and off in a bar for eight years while writing and living on literary grants. and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Gordon Burn Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize for writers under the age of 40 and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for writers under the age of 40.

In June 2018, Riley was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative.

Her sixth novel, My Phantoms, published in 2021, was shortlisted for the Folio Prize. The novel follows the difficult relationships between Bridget and her parents, both as a child and an adult. The Guardian praised it as "a brilliant portrait of a mother-daughter relationship in which every encounter is a battle" and noted that "in all its horrible, funny, uncomfortable truthfulness, it feels increasingly like a complicated act of love". The Times Literary Supplement said that "her icy evocations of dysfunction and distress are unforgettable" and noted the "overwhelming sense of sorrow for the phantoms that haunt Bridget's life".

Her seventh novel, The Palm House, was published in 2026. The Guardian praised Riley's "phenomenal ear for dialogue" and called it "a slim, impeccably controlled story that contains multitudes". In July 2026, the novel was longlisted for The Booker Prize.

In 2026, Riley was awarded the US$175,000 Windham-Campbell Prize, given in recognition of a writer's whole body of work.