Grace McCleen

Grace McCleen is a British novelist born in 1977 in England and raised in a fundamentalist Christian sect. She studied English at Oxford University. The Land of Decoration (2012, William Heinemann) is her debut novel, narrated by Judith, a ten-year-old girl raised in an end-times Christian community who believes she can work miracles through a scale model of the world she builds in her bedroom. When bullying at school drives her to use that power, the consequences spiral. A darkly funny and deeply unsettling exploration of childhood faith, the novel won the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2012 and the Folio Prize shortlist. Her second novel The Professor of Poetry (2013) continues her interest in religious extremism and creative imagination. McCleen's fiction draws extensively on her own experience of growing up in an extreme religious community. She has written about the psychological consequences of religious upbringing in essays and interviews.