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Represented By: Sallyanne Sweeney
She is a graduate of Trinity College, IADT, and Bennington College, Vermont. Her debut novel, Follow Me To Ground, was originally published by New Island Books in Ireland (2018), in the UK by Doubleday (2019), and by Scribner in the US (2021). Her second novel, Redder Days, was published by Doubleday in Ireland and the UK (2021).
Her stories and novels have been nominated for the Republic of Consciousness Award, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Prix Jean Monnet des Jeunes Européens, the New York Radio Festival Awards, the Desperate Literature Prize for Short Fiction, and have received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly.
Sue is also the grateful recipient of the VAI/DCC Art Writing Award, the Arts Council Literature Bursary Award, a MacDowell Fellowship, the Kate O’Brien Award and le Prix Imaginales Award, and she has been awarded residencies by such institutions as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Maynooth University and University College Dublin. Notable commissions include BBC Radio 4 and RTÉ Radio 1; her short story, "Shorn", was read by Saoirse Ronan.
Most recently, Follow Me To Ground and Redder Days have been published by Aux Forges de Vulcain in France.
Photo Credit: Ali Rainsford
Represented By: Sallyanne Sweeney
She is a graduate of Trinity College, IADT, and Bennington College, Vermont. Her debut novel, Follow Me To Ground, was originally published by New Island Books in Ireland (2018), in the UK by Doubleday (2019), and by Scribner in the US (2021). Her second novel, Redder Days, was published by Doubleday in Ireland and the UK (2021).
Her stories and novels have been nominated for the Republic of Consciousness Award, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Prix Jean Monnet des Jeunes Européens, the New York Radio Festival Awards, the Desperate Literature Prize for Short Fiction, and have received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly.
Sue is also the grateful recipient of the VAI/DCC Art Writing Award, the Arts Council Literature Bursary Award, a MacDowell Fellowship, the Kate O’Brien Award and le Prix Imaginales Award, and she has been awarded residencies by such institutions as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Maynooth University and University College Dublin. Notable commissions include BBC Radio 4 and RTÉ Radio 1; her short story, "Shorn", was read by Saoirse Ronan.
Most recently, Follow Me To Ground and Redder Days have been published by Aux Forges de Vulcain in France.
Photo Credit: Ali Rainsford
Author: Sue Rainsford
Genres: Literary Fiction
From Out My Heart is a darkly sensuous novel about two women whose bodies become the threshold through which the living and the dead insist on speaking, from the award-winning author of Follow Me to Ground and Redder Days.
When Phyllipa, a scholar chasing the lingering pulse of Edgar Allan Poe, travels to a remote, river‑ruled community, she finds herself drawn into the orbit of Lana: a woman whose faith, exhaustion, and old wounds make her strangely open to visitation. Their encounters unfold in a landscape of heatstorms, thickets, and swollen riverlight, where possession is not a metaphor but a physical event: a tremor in the voice, a shift in the hips, a borrowed breath. As Phyllipa records Lana’s transformations, she feels her own interior loosening – the boundaries between scholarship and desire, between inquiry and complicity, dissolving into the wet dark of the woods.
Rainsford crafts a gothic of flesh and inheritance, where motherhood, harm, and spectral longing press against the skin. A novel of haunting in its truest sense: the way another life can move through a woman’s body, and the way a woman can become the echo chamber for what history refuses to release.