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Lottie Mills

  • Feb 2
  • 2 min read

Thursday 4 December 2025


This was a light-hearted but insightful evening with Lottie, an inspiring young writer. She engaged in a meaningful conversation with Sophie Green, librarian with Suffolk Libraries and published author.  


Lottie Mills was born in Hampshire and studied English at Newnham College, Cambridge1.  She graduated in 2022, and was at university during the Covid pandemic, which she described as ‘rough …lots of Zoom’. During this time she wrote many of the stories for her debut short story collection Monstrum, published in 2024 and longlisted for the 2025 Dylan Thomas Prize2. Before that came Lottie’s short story ‘The Changeling’, which was ‘based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, and centered on a changeling child. Lottie felt that the concept of a changeling, fairy child substituted for a human baby, could reflect early concepts of disability or neurodiversity, because a child is different. She ‘found this fascinating and quite appealing’. Readers agreed and Lottie won the BBC Young Writers’ Award in 2020.


Lottie uses a wheelchair and spoke incisively about how disability may affect a writer’s work. She noted that ‘monstrum’  is the Latin word for monster but historically it often referred to disability. Her collection of stories celebrates our fear of the unusual. From changelings to selkies (shapeshifters with the ability to become humans or seals) her work is imbued with a sense of magic and ‘the other’; although she expressed surprise that some readers have categorised it as horror. 


Recently, she has secured a job as writer in residence at a school local to her, explaining that it is useful as writers typically get less than the minimum wage for their chosen profession. Discussing artificial intelligence (AI), she observed that it is ‘programmed to give you what you want’, but has its uses. Sophie and Lottie agreed that the short story is a neglected form, known to be difficult to sell but actually good for the short attention spans that seem to be a feature of modern life. When undertaking her writing, Lottie is a night owl, appreciating that night-time gives her more of her own space. Her influences are wide ranging, from John Wyndham through Angela Carter to the brothers Grimm. Finally, she stated that she is a compulsive writer. We can therefore expect more from a gifted budding author with a very bright future.


  1. Simon & Schuster. Lottie Mills: about the author, 2026 [Accessed January, 4 2026]. https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/authors/Lottie-Mills/215971328



Janet Bayliss 


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