About Kirsten Arcadio

Hi, I’m Kirsten Arcadio, a writer of speculative fiction from the UK.

Since 2014 I’ve published four novels, each with a different speculative theme. Borderliners, Split Symmetry and WorldCult were published in 2014 and my coming-of-age thriller, Zeitgeist, in 2017.

I spent my early career working in digital communications before sitting down in 2011 to write down all the ‘what-if’ questions I wanted to explore using fictional scenarios. In the decade that followed, I did this and more. I wrote four novels before leaving everything (my career and my writing) to run a small chain of coffee shops with my husband. This took me away from the writing for a time but then in 2019, the inexorable pull of novel-writing got its claws into me again, and between 2019 and 2024 I completed a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. As a result of my research, two more speculative thrillers are underway.

I returned to digital communications in 2021 and I’m now lucky enough to work in a creative arts and FE college in London where my colleagues, regardless of which department they work in, all share my passion for the creative arts.

When I’m not writing, I obsess about other people’s stories and creations. I used to think I was alone in a world where attempting to mix high concepts with fiction was a foolish mission nobody was interested in. But then I discovered wonderful writers in the genre: John Marrs, Blake Crouch and Will Dean, in particular, but there are many more.

And although I live within speculative worlds, I also straddle physical ones. European to my core, I’m a dual Irish-UK national in an Anglo-Italian family. I love all things European but especially Italian, and I hope to revisit more of Italy in my future novels!