How One of the Year’s Most Anticipated Debut Novels Was Written While Its Author Slept

AGE: 30
BASED IN: Austin
NOW PLUGGING: A Real Animal, July 2026

If you’ve scrolled through most-anticipated lists recently, you’ve likely seen Emeline Atwood’s provocative bull-meets-woman’s-crotch book cover. (The author has no relation to the more famous Margaret Atwood.) A Real Animal is the writer and poet’s debut novel, following a 20-something woman’s descent into her animal instincts while navigating sex, familial relationships, assault, and cross-country moves. As the story unfolds, the line between those instincts’ metaphorical and supernatural character becomes blurred.

Describe your writing ritual.

I’ve discovered, over the years, that I write my best stuff when I’m sleeping, or at least when it feels like I’m asleep. I wake up throughout the night in inspirational, panicky spurts—wild rushes of insights, answers, fantastic thoughts. I do this all night, my body begging to fall asleep, my mind insisting on waking up. If I ever get tangled in a scene or feel unmotivated and overwhelmed, I know that if I’m willing to sacrifice a night of deep sleep (and I’m always willing, under these circumstances), then I will get the work done, and I will do it well.

Describe the moment you decided to pursue writing as a career. What made you think you could pull it off?

I can’t think of a time, except before the age of 5, when I didn’t dream of publishing a book. Lately, in the madness that is this world, I’ve become more envious of people with faith—the kind where your belief in a higher power makes you better at suffering and feeling and forgiving and shedding—but I have always had faith in my sensibility as a writer, that I can pick up on the nerves of a situation, the “moments of being” that “prick” you (Virginia Woolf), that are violent with meaning and full of narrative, that give and give when you press on them. I have faith that I can feel these nerves in any given situation. Even if horrible things happen to me, I have faith that I can survive them because I can, and will, write through them and into them.

What’s the biggest challenge young writers face today?

One that I’ve felt in my own body is this challenge of disembodiment, this farming out of our brains, this crisis of technological mimesis that would dizzy [Walter] Benjamin, this world that’s tricking us into thinking we’re connecting when we are not, that we are looking into the eyes of another when we are not. We are not only becoming bad at inhabiting space in a way that recognizes the ecosystem, but we are also deluding ourselves into believing we know more than we ever have about “things,” but we are merely bloated with a knowledge that is mimicking knowledge. 

It is possible, in this world, that people will stop reading, will stop being able to spell, stop being able to finish thoughts without the help of a chatbot, that people will no longer be able to hold a pen or write a cursive G. Don’t let that happen to you. 

What do you think your generation should read more—and less—of?

More poetry. Less non-fiction about “optimization.” Read a whole book of poems, or read everything that a poet has ever written, like Walt Whitman, or Dionne Brand, or Emily Dickinson. Read things that make you forget yourself. Don’t read things that you hope you’ll remember so you can impress someone later when you regurgitate it.If you do want to remember what you read, then memorize the whole book. Know what you read by heart—as in, it’s in your heart.

This feature is part of the inaugural Young Writers list n collaboration with Montblanc. You can meet the rest of the participants here.