Katalina Watt
Instant #3 Sunday Times bestseller, Royal Society of Literature Awardee, UNESCO Writer in Residence, and Hugo Award finalist with a decade of experience in the book industry.
.avif)
An author of speculative and gothic fiction, Katalina received a 2025 Literature Matters Award from the Royal Society of Literature, and was a 2023 Hugo Award finalist and AIR Literature UNESCO 2024 Gothenburg Writer in Residence. Their debut epic fantasy novel Saltswept (2026, Hodderscape) was an instant #3 Sunday Times Bestseller, with the second book in The Earthsalt Duology: Saltsworn publishing in 2027.
Katalina has worked in the book industry for over a decade on award-winning and bestselling books across traditional publishing for both Big Five and independent houses. They read English Literature at the University of Glasgow and Publishing at Edinburgh Napier University.
Katalina’s Genres
- Speculative Fiction
- Gothic
- Horror
Please note: all genuine emails from Katalina Watt will come from @thenovelry.com.
Saltswept
A ragtag crew. A perilous quest. First, they need a boat. Next, they need to learn how to sail it.
A pirate faces the gallows drop. A farmer is given a terrible ultimatum to save her daughter. An acolyte ascends to priestesshood... only to find that a blessing really can be a curse. These unlikely bedfellows band together with an inscrutable pickpocket and a talking ottercat in pursuit of the most hopeless of causes: to sail into the Maelstrom—a raging whirlpool from which no one has ever escaped—and the mysterious treasure hidden within it.
The quest will test their fragile allegiance to its limits, but there is more at stake here than getting rich: the magic of the world is in peril, and the barrier between life and death has never been so thin. And in the Bastion, the seat of power in Paranish, the queen has an unquenchable thirst that threatens the world and everyone in it.
