Ever Dundas
Ever Dundas is a Scottish author whose fiction occupies a distinctive space between literary fiction, speculative dystopia, and dark satire, and whose debut novel announced a genuinely original and challenging new voice in British speculative writing. They are based in Scotland and their work engages directly with Scottish culture, landscape, and political identity while projecting those concerns into imagined futures that illuminate the present. Their background in creative writing and their engagement with disability culture and neurodivergence are evident throughout their fiction.
HellSans (2023), available on WritersReview, is Dundas’s second novel and is one of the more formally and conceptually ambitious British speculative novels of recent years. Set in a near-future Britain in which a specific typeface — HellSans — has been developed that produces a euphoric response in most of the population, and an allergic, painful response in a minority, the novel uses its typographical premise to construct a society built on the systematic exclusion and brutalisation of those who cannot access the dominant experience. The novel follows both a corporate executive who has built her career on HellSans and a member of the persecuted minority, and unfolds as a taut political thriller and a rigorous examination of how majorities construct and justify the suffering of minorities. The premise is extraordinary, and Dundas executes it with intelligence and formal confidence.
Dundas’s work belongs to the tradition of British dystopian fiction — Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Katharine Burdekin — that uses speculative premises to make the mechanisms of oppression legible and immediate. The HellSans conceit is clearly allegorical but never reductive: the specificity of the typographical premise is worked out with enough care that it generates its own internal logic, and the novel’s exploration of disability, neurodivergence, and bodily difference as the basis for social exclusion feels both urgently contemporary and carefully grounded.
Their debut novel, Goblin (2018), similarly blended dark material — a young girl’s experience of loss, violence, and displacement — with a fantastical sensibility, and was longlisted for the Saltire Society Scottish Fiction Book of the Year Award. Dundas is an important emerging voice in Scottish and British speculative fiction, and their work represents the genre at its most socially and formally ambitious.
