When Penny was five she wrote at school that she likes fish and chips and wants to write books. Both are still true! 

Penny is passionate about positive disability representation in fiction. One fifth of the UK population is disabled, so why don’t we see that reflected in novels?  

Penny Batchelor is an alumni of Faber Academy's six month 'Writing a Novel' course and the author of two psychological thrillers, My Perfect Sister and Her New Best Friend, both published by Embla Books. My Perfect Sister was longlisted for The Guardian's Not The Booker Prize 2020, and Her New Best Friend was described by LoveReading as 'a white-knuckle tense thriller'. Her short story ‘The Debate’ is in an anthology called UnLocked, published in November 2022 to raise money for The Trussell Trust by a group of authors who all debuted in 2020.

She and author Victoria Scott successfully campaigned for Amazon to introduce a disability fiction character for adults in their books section. With Clare Christian Penny co-founded and runs the #KeepFestivalsHybrid campaign, urging literary festivals to maintain an online presence, and also co-founded and is a judge of the ADCI Literary Prize for disabled and chronically ill authors who include positive disability representation in their novels. The first winner, Nicola Griffith for Spear, was announced in June 2023.