BIO

Viki Collins is a writer and award-winning artist based in Kent, UK. She's also a mum, cat servant and armchair detective and psychologist.

Her first children's book, "The Platypus", was self-published via Amazon, but she lives in hope that her debut novel - a contemporary fiction thriller - will be picked up by an agent and released into the world via traditional publishing. 

Viki is a prolific reader of both fiction and non-fiction in various genres, but particularly crime, thriller, horror and contemporary fiction. She's inspired by writers such as Liane Moriarty, Karin Slaughter and Sally Rooney.

She hopes if she ever grows up she'll be just like them.

 

Viki was born in the 1980s in Kent, with three kidneys and a dodgy appendix. She's lived there ever since. Via Ancestry, she discovered she has deep, Irish roots - her paternal grandparents who she was never lucky enough to meet were from Longford and Donegal - which makes sense, as she's always wanted to live in Ireland. Luckily, she's also a pluviophile, so she knows she'd probably feel right at home.

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As a child she was a pain in the backside, flitting from one creative hobby to the next, interspersed with bouts of writing. Sadly, no one ever informed her that "artist" and "author" are actual jobs, so she started her career as a newsreader and voice artist for those annoying jingles on a local radio station, before following it up with various call centre jobs, pub jobs and even managed an adult toy shop...

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In 2006 she quit everything in her pursuit for creative freedom and her bank was very upset. Nonetheless, she persevered and set up an online shop selling fair trade clothing, festival accessories, body jewellery and random artwork she created. When, to everyone's surprise, it became a successful venture, she began to create more of her own work, refining her own unique style using various forms of media, whilst secretly writing the beginnings of a science fiction novel in the background.

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In an effort to gain more experience for her creative work, Viki took extra jobs as a librarian, a teaching assistant and even an activities assistant in a retirement community where she worked closely with dementia patients, creating art and stories with them. 

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Then: Covid.

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In 2020, when she was forced to shield thanks to her third kidney almost killing her in her early 20s, she set up The embRUDEry Store which, much to her surprise again, became extremely successful and won her several awards for her "unique" approach to embroidery and cross stitch... Her horror and TV-themed embroideries fuelled her passion for everything spooky, and it eventually evolved into Kent Coast Ghosts: unique clay ghost sculptures individually themed toward Kentish folklore and history. In 2022, Kent Coast Ghosts was hand picked by Dragon's Den's Theo Paphitis to win the coveted SBS award and a place in his small business community.

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After two hectic years of making ghosts for 12 hours a day, Viki was exhausted, so she took a step back to focus once more on her writing. For a short time she continued the draft of the science fiction novel, but ultimately decided that her writing needed to come from somewhere else inside herself: they say "write what you know", and she didn't know who "they" were, but she ran with it, and by February of 2026 she had completed her first full draft of a contemporary fiction novel that she has titled "Release". In it, she has drawn on her own life experiences to bring her characters to life, with a visceral story that focuses on familial relationships, loss and grief, and redemption.

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Viki Collins is currently seeking representation for her debut novel, and we'll keep you updated! If you're an agent interested in representation, please contact Viki at: viki@vikicollins.co.uk

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