About Jude Reid
Jude lives in Glasgow with her husband, two daughters, dog, cat and rabbits, and writes dark stories in the gaps between work as a surgeon and wrangling her menagerie.
Her short fiction has been published in numerous anthologies including 'Haunted Voices: An Anthology of Scottish Gothic Storytelling', 'Places We Fear To Tread' (Cemetery Gates Media) and 'The Corona Book of Ghost Stories'. She is currently working on her first novel.
Photo © Rhiannon Swan-Price.
Jude's comments
'Working as a doctor, one of the things I remember from early in the pandemic was the realisation of how helpless we all were. We had nothing beyond "best supportive care" — oxygen, fluids and respiratory support. I started thinking about how doctors must have felt in earlier times, able to diagnose disease but often powerless to affect its course. Writing about my experience as fiction in a historical setting gave me some extra distance to explore emotions that were otherwise too raw to properly articulate: mostly the guilt, the fear and the desperate sadness of it all.'
Jude Reid's commission (PDF)
(195 KB; 21 pages)
Nadine Aisha Jassat's comments
Poet, writer and creative practitioner Nadine Aisha Jassat led the Fresh Ink initiative. She writes about Jude's commission:
'I couldn't put Jude Reid's "Magpie" down. This story is a page turning journey through history, framed by three pandemics. A perfectly balanced tale, told from a writer working within the health service during the pandemic whose pen takes us out of time through history, and out of reality into the ethereal. Reading Jude's writing, I feel confident that we are holding a piece of work here that not only captures a writer's experience of 2020, but also holds a place in the journey of a writer who I hope the future brings only more and more work from.'