About Walt Sidney

I have been writing since I was fourteen, back when my only goal was to make films. I needed screenplays for the short movies I wanted to create, so I taught myself how storytelling works: structure, pacing, dialogue, emotion. Later, I studied dramatic writing for two years, where I explored writing not only for the screen but also for th

I have been writing since I was fourteen, back when my only goal was to make films. I needed screenplays for the short movies I wanted to create, so I taught myself how storytelling works: structure, pacing, dialogue, emotion. Later, I studied dramatic writing for two years, where I explored writing not only for the screen but also for the stage.

Then nothing. A decade long writer’s block.

Until one day I stopped trying to write screenplays and started writing novels instead, and the stories returned like they had been waiting for me all along. Around the same time, I began writing under the pen name Walt Sidney, a shift that gave me a strange and necessary freedom. A distance from myself, and therefore a way back into the work.

Now I write fiction with a cinematic pulse, and I publish independently. Not because it is easy, but because waiting for an agency can become its own kind of creative prison.

I write stories about people at the edge of things, at the beginning of history, at the end of certainty, or in the quiet space where connection becomes a choice rather than an instinct. My work moves between deep time, imagined futures, and re-told pasts, but it always returns to the body: how it remembers, how it adapts, and how it reaches for others.

I’m drawn to moments that don’t announce themselves. To pauses, small decisions, and acts of care that happen without witnesses. I’m less interested in spectacle than in attention, in what people do when there is no guarantee of survival, legacy, or meaning beyond the act itself.

Across my writing, the settings may change, but the questions remain steady. What does it mean to stay with someone? What survives when language, history, or systems fall away? How do love, memory, and responsibility take shape when nothing is promised in return?

These are quiet books. They don’t rush. They trust the reader to notice. I try to write in a way that leaves space, for breath, for silence, for the reader’s own body to be present in the story.

I live and work in Sweden, where landscape, weather, and long stretches of stillness quietly shape how I think about time, movement, and belonging. Writing, for me, is a way of staying close to the human scale of things, to what can be carried, shared, or lost.

My forthcoming novel, Horizon, is my debut and part of an ongoing body of work exploring survival, intimacy, and transformation across radically different worlds, all connected by the same underlying attention to care and choice.
If you’d like to follow along, read an excerpt, or return later, you’re very welcome to do so. This space will continue to grow as the work does.