About Elin

Elin Heron author.
Elin Heron

Elin Heron

Elin is a writer and musician, a turner of cards and a speaker of Welsh.

Creating stories is the central element of Elin’s personal magical praxis and her writing process involves dismantling the lines of reality, truth and fiction. Her fiction has magic, landscape and the dead as its central themes and is often set in liminal, thin places or those with a strong spiritual or magical significance. Elin’s poetry also examines themes of strangeness and the supernatural but is more personal, in the context of family lines, curses and the Welsh landscape of her ancestors. She has a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from the Open University and 2024 will see the publication of her first novel, JUDE, with Lucent Dreaming.

For over fifteen years, Elin has taught the Welsh language to people from all over the world and continues to do so in classes and online. Having spent much of her life visiting or living in Wales, and having read Welsh in the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, there are strong currents of Welsh legend, language and landscape woven into her work.

Since childhood, Elin has stuck pins in books, picked petals from flowers, spun coins, thrown dice, poured tea and shuffled cards. She began reading the tarot at the age of thirteen and has continued to turn cards in a variety of settings. In 2018 Elin launched Derbyshire Tarot, offering readings, workshops and classes in the tarot. She continues to use the cards to inform her work and magic.

Elin is an experienced musician with a background in music retail, performing, teaching and directing. She works teaching piano privately and in schools and has also worked as a church organist and director of music, spending several years volunteering with the Royal School of Church Music where she organised choral events and examinations. She has been a member of a number of choirs and currently sings with the St Anne’s Singers in Derby.

She is married to artist and musician Ed Heron and has a son and three hens.

Stories

In 2020 A is for Apple was published in Fiddler’s Green Issue 7 Gods of the Afternoon with illustrations by Alexis Berger.

John Truslove, a short story in the final fifty of the BBC Short Story Award 2021, was published in issue 11 of Lucent Dreaming in 2022. Read online here.

Burnwater is a story which makes use of a fifteenth century poem about blacksmiths to give voice to the ‘burnwater’ of the title. It was published in 2022 by Litro Online. Read online here.

In 2023, Stone was published in Ram Eye Rites & Wrongs – a collection of ritual horror.

Novels

Elin’s first novel, Jude, is due for publication with Lucent Dreaming in 2024.

Poetry

Starlings was published in issue 85 of Mslexia in 2020.

In 2015 Dear Michael was the category and overall winner of the Not About Heroes/Feelgood Theatre Whispers of War Poetry competition.

Member of the Society of Authors Link