Elou Carroll is a graphic designer and freelance photographer who writes. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing with English Literature from the University of Chester and a Master’s in Publishing from Oxford Brookes.

She likes to catch ideas in jars and stash them away until she is ready to eat them. She would one day like to build a goldfish circus and often obeys the whims of inanimate objects.

Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Apparition Literary Magazine, Underland Arcana, Hexagon SF Magazine, IN SOMNIO: A Collection of Modern Gothic Horror, and others. Her short story “The Great Green Forever” was shortlisted for the 2020 HG Wells Short Story Competition (Grand Senior Prize). In 2021, her short story “A Gift, a Witch and a Wakening of Honey” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. In 2022, “Become a Flute, Become a Spyglass, Become a Knife” made the top 10 in the Ladies of Horror Fiction Readers’ Choice Awards.

Recently, she has been sharing tiny horror stories on twitter as part of the #horrorprompt and #vsshorror hashtags.

When she’s not whispering with ghosts or tormenting her cats, Elou edits Crow & Cross Keys—an online literary journal that publishes the beautiful, dark, strange and lovely.

Elou lives in the West Midlands with her long-suffering other half, their cats (a one-eyed pirate and a chunky former stray), several tiny pumpkins and a life-size resin skull replica named Bertha. Every spring, she is visited by a tiny bird and could, therefore, be a folkloric goblin princess—emphasis on the goblin. She is waiting for further proof on the matter before collecting the keys to her queendom.

twitter / instagram / goodreads

interviews

November 2022
BackStory with FlashBack Fiction

Elou discusses the story behind “I Am Held in the Hands of God Who Is Named Walter Potter; or, from the Case of ‘The Death and Burial of Cock Robin’” published on FlashBack Fiction

June 2022
Interview with Luna Station Quarterly

Elou answers questions about her story “Tatterdemalion, or of Apple Bough and Straw” from Luna Station Quarterly issue 50, gives tips on writing description, and confesses to the chaos that is her writing process

March 2022
Interview on TERRIFY ME! With Antony Frost

Elou and Antony have a chat about ghosts and gothic fiction, Crow & Cross Keys and the wonder of being surrounded by words

August 2021
IN SOMNIO Author Spotlight

Elou discusses the theatre, her teenage roots and reads from her story “Ghost Light”

May 2021
Editor Interview on Duotrope

On behalf of Crow & Cross Keys, Elou talks submission preferences, favourite authors, influences and other such publication-related topics