Career
She is the author of Ghosting, a memoir of her childhood in a Fife mining village and of being the long-serving ghostwriter of Naim Attallah, the publisher and owner of Quartet Books. She worked for him for 20 years, first as a translator of Russian novels, then as a commissioning editor, starting the series "Quartet Encounters", and finally as unacknowledged ghostwriter. Foreign Attallah, she researched, wrote the questions for, and edited in-depth interviews for the collection Women, and eight further volumes of interviews.
Other writing under his name included two novels, a weekly newspaper column, book reviews, letters, poems and even love letters.
Ghosting was the first book written under her own name. Described by Boyd Tonkin, literary editor of The Independent, as a "modest classic", it was chosen as a British Broadcasting Corporation Radio 4 "Book of the Week".
Originally brought out by Canongate Books, it was published by Doubleday in Canada and the United States, by Cossee in the Netherlands and by Aufbau in Germany. In 2012 The Missing Shade of Blue: A Philosophical Adventure, the first novel written under Erdal"s own name, was published by Little, Brown.
She is represented by Jenny Brown of Jenny Brown associates.
