Sue Rainsford Books in Order

Sue Rainsford is an Irish fiction and arts writer from Dublin, where she also grew up in Sandymount with her parents and sister. She has said she wanted to be a writer from a young age, and reading was a constant part of her childhood. Family trips to Dublin bookshops made a lasting impression, so seeing her own debut on a shelf years later carried real weight.

Her route into fiction ran through the visual arts. Rainsford studied art history at Trinity College Dublin, then visual arts practices at IADT, and worked as an arts writer. She was always reading fiction alongside that work, though, and later completed an MFA in Writing and Literature at Bennington College in Vermont.

Images, bodies, and the meanings people attach to them are central to her work.

Her first novel, Follow Me to Ground, grew out of a project she began while studying visual arts. It took shape over about five years, alongside further study and a period of persistent submissions and rejections. Rainsford has spoken openly about nearly stepping back from writing before the novel found a publisher. Instead, it arrived in Ireland in 2018, then reached readers in the UK, the United States, and France.

Follow Me to Ground introduces Ada, a young woman who lives with her father near a village and helps heal the sick through strange, physical rituals tied to the dangerous Ground. The novel blends folklore, horror, desire, illness, and questions about who gets to control a woman’s body. It won the Kate O’Brien Award and was longlisted for both the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Award.

Her second novel, Redder Days, moves into a harsher, near-apocalyptic setting. Twins Anna and Adam live in the remains of a commune, following rituals shaped by its former leader while waiting for a disaster they believe is coming. The book keeps Rainsford’s interest in bodily fear, coercion, isolation, and the damage done when authority goes unchecked, but shifts the focus toward survival and the bond between siblings.

The stories are strange, but the emotional pressures are very human.

Rainsford’s fiction often puts people in enclosed communities or remote landscapes where old beliefs and daily routines become hard to question. Her characters face desire, loyalty, illness, grief, and fear without easy explanations. Readers drawn to unsettling speculative fiction, folk horror, and stories that leave room for ambiguity will find much to explore in her novels.

Alongside fiction, Rainsford has continued to write about art and to take part in residencies and public projects. Her work has been supported by the Arts Council Literature Bursary Award, the VAI/DCC Art Writing Award, and a MacDowell Fellowship. She has also held residencies with institutions including the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Maynooth University, and University College Dublin. Her short work has appeared in radio commissions, too.

She remains based in Dublin, working across fiction and arts writing. A third novel, From Out My Heart, is scheduled for publication in 2026. For now, Follow Me to Ground and Redder Days offer two different entrances into a body of work that is intimate, unsettling, and never quite comfortable.