Elizabeth Broadbent

Elizabeth Broadbent is an American author of Southern Gothic fiction, science fiction, and speculative poetry. She is best known for her novella Blood Cypress (2025), set in the swampy town of Lower Congaree. Her earlier works include Ink Vine and Ninety-Eight Sabers (2024), with Breaking Neverland and Tigers of Greater Antarctica due in 2026. Blood Cypress was published by Raw Dog Screaming Press and received early praise from authors Lee Murray and Clay McLeod Chapman.

Elizabeth Broadbent was raised in South Carolina. She began writing stories at the age of five. Elizabeth earned her MFA at the University of South Carolina. During this time, author George Singleton assigned her a short story. She responded with Naked & Famous, an 11,000-word novella. "Oops," she said.

The piece was a semi-finalist in the 2006 William Faulkner/William Wisdom Awards. That same year, she was a top ten finalist in the novel-in-progress category. Her repeated wins in the James Dickey Award's fiction competition led to a light-hearted ban on further entries.

Naked & Famous was later rediscovered and revised. Accepted by two publishers on the same day, it was published by EJL Editions on 19 July 2023.

Before her speculative work, Broadbent had a long career as a journalist and essayist. She wrote for Scary Mommy for over eight years, covering parenting, politics and mental health. Her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, Time Magazine, Insider and more. She has been featured on NPR, MSNBC, CNN and BBC World News.

"My favourite essays have been on the Murdaugh murders, Moms for Liberty, Q-Anon and Cocaine Bear," she said. In her BBC appearance, she criticised the use of AI in writing. Conservative commentator Joe Walsh once described her as "everything wrong with America today" in a now-deleted tweet.

Broadbent also wrote ten young adult novels under the pen name Annabeth Chatwin. These books offered stories for LGBTQIA+ teens in the American South. "I didn't want his children to know they were his wife's," she said of her husband's students. One of those novels, He Called Me Beautiful, earned an orange banner on Amazon for over a year.

Since 2022, Broadbent has concentrated on speculative fiction. Most of her horror is set in Legare County, particularly the fictional town of Lower Congaree. Her science fiction often revisits a shared cyberpunk world.

Blood Cypress (2025) follows Lila Carson, a queer girl in a crumbling southern town, as she ventures into a forbidden swamp to find her missing brother. "Dark and lush and deeply disturbing," says Lee Murray. The story explores loss, fear and isolation. It blends folk horror with southern gothic in what Tim McGregor describes as "a bold, assured narrative voice".

Broadbent continues to freelance for ADDitude magazine, which caters for readers with ADHD and autism. She cites Faulkner, Fitzgerald, O'Connor and Wolfe as her influences, alongside contemporary horror writers such as Lee Murray, Tim McGregor and Ai Jiang.

Photo credit: www.writerelizabethbroadbent.com