Short Bio
​Susan Finlay is the author of five novels and an anti-memoir. She lives in Berlin, Germany.

Long Bio
Susan Finlay is the author of the novels The Ultraviolet Catastrophe, The Jacques Lacan Foundation, My Other Spruce & Maple Self, Objektophila, and Arriviste, and the anti-memoir, The Lives of the Artists. Her books have been White Review Books of the Year, Anti-Capitalist Books of the Year, and many independent bookstore and art galleries' Recommended Reads. They also appear within the photographic backdrops of lifestyle magazine features and in the opening credits of Fashion Neurosis. 

Indeed, having originally studied Visual Art at Camberwell and the Royal College of Art, London, many of the same longstanding preoccupations—be they trend-forecasting, psychoanalysis, and/or the glorious consumerism of Georges Bataille—inform Susan's writing regardless of subject or genre. Her essays have been commissioned for artists' books by Zoe Williams, MV Brown, Lucy McKenzie, and Reba Maybury, as have similarly themed fictional pieces for anthologies including Werkplaats Typografie's Pure Fiction, Pilot Press' Untitled (eye with comet), and Map Magazine's Out-of-Office: Auto-Reply. Her cultural criticism has been published in magazines such as Tate Etc., Frieze, Spike, Art Review, A Rabbit's Foot, and Motor Dance Journal. Her poems and short stories in POETRY, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Stinging Fly, and The Toe Rag.

More recently, Susan completed an AHRC funded PhD at the University of Manchester. This focussed on the use of Institutional Critique as an educational methodology and was the result of over a decade sneaking into the womenswear departments of UK FE and HE arts organisations (i.e. doing something besides the teaching she was officially paid for). Although this led to the realisation that she dislikes traditional academic structures regardless of whether her relationship to them is as a lecturer or student, some of the tropes she observed within these organisations informed the exhibition Inland Far, co-curated with Mimei Thompson at the Herbert Read Gallery in Canterbury.

​Other collaborative projects include the literary programmes Screen Time and Recreation for a.p., the former publication space at Callie's, and REAL EKPHRASIS with Erin Honeycutt for ChertLudde, both Berlin; the performance The Annual General Meeting for Artefacts Projects, Birmingham, UK; the multi-format artists and writers' organ, Jour Mal Jour Nal; and the art-music collective Holiday Instruments. Previously, Susan was an associate editor at JOAN; founded the Coelacanth Press with Phoebe Blatton, where she co-edited four editions of the biannual journal; and founded the independent publisher MOIST, with her father, Paul Finlay, which she co-ran until Summer 2025. The final book that she commissioned and edited was Nell Osbourne's Ghost Driver. 

Besides the above, Susan continues to produce—but rarely exhibit—visual art (an archive of which can be accessed here).  She has undertaken artist residences in China, Greece, Lithuania, North America, and the UK, and now resides, for the most part, in Germany.