Edinburgh author Alex Howard has truly made his mark on the literary world, after writing a novel inspired by his cat. The Times and USA Today bestselling author, and part-time TikToker, is surprised by the success of his book Ghost Cat. The idea for the story came when, just days after moving into a tenement flat in the city, his cat Tabitha started behaving strangely and hissing a lot.
Surge interviewed Alex to find out more about the book and to get sneak peak into tho his next exciting project.
Where did your passion for writing and history come from?
If there was one job that really crystallised my interest in Edinburgh history, it was my time being a tour guide on the Royal Mile. I did history and ghost tours for about 10 years when I was a student, on and off. That job taught me how to tell a story, hold an audience, and capture the magic of history.
How did Edinburgh inspire your book Ghost Cat?
Just the beauty of Edinburgh and the architecture. The “ghost cat” itself came to me when my cat hissed into the void in the back bedroom of our new flat. That prompted me to think, “What is she seeing?” Was she seeing some sort of ghost or “ghost cat”?
You studied poetry. How has that impacted your style of writing?
An old French poet said, “Prose is just poetry but drawn out.” I kind of always subscribed to that. I very much work on a sentence level and build up. Studying poetry for both my undergraduate degree and my PhD, I just have that obsession with sentence-level magic. Philip Larkin said, “Poetry should be a small pristine shock.” Not everyone likes that in my writing. It polarises people. How I write is a very concentrated and poetic take on history because I was a poet long before I was a writer.
The poetry comes through in your writing but there are also very accessible themes in the book like cat companionship, and people can connect with that.
In my day job, I work with people with dementia at the Festival Theatre. I spend most of my week talking to people that have lived in Edinburgh since the 1940s, which is a real source of inspiration for me. I’m very interested in that old tradition of storytelling, and they teach me a lot about what Edinburgh used to look like.
Tell us a little about Grimalkin, the star of the novel.
In 2017 I went to Paris and met Aggie, the resident cat of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop on the Left Bank in Paris. Aggie was a soft-natured cat with a crooked tail but it was her expression that remained with me – a slightly melancholy, sage, world-weary expression. And that’s what I thought Grimalkin would look like.
What are your inspirations for future writing and are you planning another book?
At the moment I’m writing The Ship’s Cat. I’ve always been fascinated with nautical and maritime superstition and history. The trope of a ship’s cat that brings good fortune to sailors is very cherished both in Europe and the Far East. I liked the idea of a cat totally different from Grimalkin – a London alley cat who doesn’t know he has this power and finds himself at sea.
This idea stemmed from a cat I saw in the Meadows in a cat rucksack in an orb, and the ship’s cat lodged in my head. I had a job once as a deckhand going port to port in the summer and saw a lot of cats, and they seemed to have a story to tell. It’s important to me that it’s very different from the ghost cat. This one is a more edgy cat.
The Ghost Cat by Alex Howard is available at all good bookshops and look out for publication of The Ship’s Cat, scheduled for Spring 2026.
