Carole Burns is a prize-winning author whose most recent book, The Same Country (Legend Press, 2023), was named a top 2023 Welsh fiction book by the Wales Arts Review.  A journalist for publications such as the Washington Post and LitHub, she recently served as the lead fiction judge for the 2025 Wales Book of the Year Award. Her collection, The Missing Woman and Other Stories, published by Parthian Books, won the 2015 John C. Zacharis First Book Award, given by the prestigious U.S. literary journal Ploughshares. Off the Page: Writers Talk About Beginnings, Endings, and Everything in Between, published by W.W. Norton, was based on interviews with 43 authors including Jhumpa Lahiri, Anthony Doerr and the late A.S. Byatt. 

She is an associate professor at the University of Southampton, where she founded and directs the Writers in Conversation reading series with guests including Xiaolu Guo, Jennifer Egan, Katherine Stansfield, Philip Gross and Patrice Lawrence. Carole lives in Cardiff.