Andy Kirby started to write seriously after just losing out on winning a cash prize on a TV game show, despite being told the answers beforehand… What they say about your mind going blank when you’re in front of the TV cameras and sweating because of the lights really is true.
Writing fiction to suspend belief in skint reality is his stock in trade now, and he’s lucky enough to have his short stories featured in a wide number of publications, including anthologies (Legend Press's Eight Rooms, Nemonymous 8: Cone Zero & Nemonymous 9: Cern Zoo from Megazanthus Press, Graveside Tales' Fried: Fast Food Slow Deaths) print journals (Sein und Werden, Skrev Press, and Champagne Shivers) and webzines (New Voices in Horror, Pumpkin, The Second Hand, US Short Story Library, and Underground).
He was runner-up in the 2008 Huddersfield Literature Festival creative writing competition, and this year was also short-listed for the Cinnamon Press short fiction prize and the Mere Literary Festival prize.
In addition to Bully, Andy has written three novels; the crime-thriller, The Magpie Trap, which has been published by Youwriteon.com and Legend Press through their Arts Council initiative, When Elephants walk through the Gorbals, which won third prize in the Luke Bitmead Memorial Bursary run by Legend Press in 2008, and the dark techno-thriller Perfect World. He is currently working on another horror novel set in the dark world of Newton Mills which has been provisionally titled Plague.
Andy’s work has been described as ‘vivid and intense’, ‘deeply disturbing’, and ‘intriguing’. He writes about the darker side of the street; that place that people hurry past without quite knowing why. He revels in creating unease in the reader. After entering his world, ‘you may want to run up and down stairs just to calm down’ as one reviewer put it.
Andy lives in Leeds, UK with his girlfriend Heidi and his incredibly noisy cat, Eric.
To find out more, visit Andy's website: www.andykirbythewriter.20m.com.
"A fierce, impassioned and very powerful piece of writing. It's bloody good, basically..." ~ Simon Bestwick, Author of Pictures of the Dark & Tide of Souls
"Reading this book is like trying to get to sleep after drinking too many vodka red bulls; you feel his anxiety and distress. But where Kirby erally shines is his naturalistic, boisterous dialogue. It is rare to read speech that is written as it should sound and it has worked to tremendous effect in this novel. On picking up BULLY, I could tell I was in store for something sinister. But it was more than that; it was horrific, bitter, twisted and aggressive." ~ Hannah Glick, Books Editor, Leeds Student Newspaper
Bully
They say you should never go back. But sometimes you don’t have a choice.
After Gary Bull’s miraculous survival from an explosion in Afghanistan, he is compelled to return to the small town where
he grew up, a place that he thought he would never set his eyes upon again. Memories of a past long buried come back to
him and he finds himself forced to face the horror of what he did when he was young. It started with the bullying...
Newton Mills appears normal enough on the surface, but scratch the surface and there is something far more sinister.
It has more than its fair share of graveyards and the skeletons are liable to walk right out of the closet.
Newton Mills is the scene of a despicable crime.
No one gets out alive.