Laline Paull

Laline Paull FRSL is a British novelist. Her debut novel, The Bees, was nominated for the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Her 2017 cli-fi novel is titled The Ice. Her 2022 novel Pod was nominated for the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction and made the shortlist.

Biography Laline Paull was born in London, UK. She is the daughter of Indian immigrants. She won a scholarship to the University of Oxford, graduating from Hertford College in 1983 with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in English. She also took screenwriting and theatre courses in London and Los Angeles. Paull has cited Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer as an influence on her work, as well as Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, which called for animal welfare, a topic Paull frequently explores.

After years of screenwriting, Paull wrote her first novel, The Bees, in 2014. The novel, which she began writing shortly after the death of a beekeeper friend, was shortlisted for the 2015 Women's Prize for Fiction. Paull's 2022 novel Pod, about a bottlenose dolphin, was longlisted for the same prize in 2023.

Themes The natural world and environmentalism are prominent themes in Paull's work. Paull has said that writing The Bees, which explores life in a honeybee colony, her research "whirled me into the all-too-real pollinator crisis...then forced me to confront the hyper-object that lay behind it: the climate crisis", which in turn led her to write the cli-fi novel The Ice. The Pod, which is about dolphins, was inspired by an incident Paull witnessed of tourists swimming with distressed wild dolphins; she later learned that these dolphins had been displaced by an oil spill. The novel depicts overfishing, ghost gear, and cetacean harvesting.