British
Missouri Williams is the pen name of Heather Williams, an English novelist who lives in Prague and edits the feminist film journal Another Gaze. Before fiction she wrote and directed King Lear with Sheep (2015), a staging of the tragedy in which the parts were played by actual sheep. Her debut novel The Doloriad (2022) drops a reader into a ruined hospital outside Prague where a Matriarch breeds a family back into existence after an unnamed catastrophe; it won the Republic of Consciousness Prize and drew comparisons to Faulkner and Krasznahorkai. Williams rejects the science-fiction label critics keep reaching for. A 2022 Granta essay described the temporal-lobe seizures that reshaped how she writes, and disability runs through her characters and their worlds rather than sitting beside them. Her second novel, The Vivisectors, sold in an eight-way auction and reached the 2026 Booker Prize longlist. Set in a city whose streets are closing over with roots, it follows Agathe, a cynical assistant to a fraudulent professor, as a campus feud pulls her into a war between academics and militant gardeners.