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Glasgow has a reputation for being the big bad city of Scotland. It's the place where, notoriously, people munch fried Mars bars and the birds binge-drink pub by pub. Which makes it hardly surprising that behind its many churches and architectural experiments the city is characterised by a gritty kind of urban existence. Considering that she is Glaswegian, it's not amazing that Zoë Strachan's work is marked by that same stark realism.

I met Zoë in the red breakfast room of a castle near Edinburgh. We were both there as Hawthornden Fellows working on different projects. Zoë, I discovered, was working on a novel, something to do with washing machines. Among the many stories that she told, stories about a poker game in Paris with her virtue at stake, about hunting for embroidery patterns in old churches, she had one about trying to find the right black hat to wear when she collected her prize. The award turned out to be the Betty Trask Award, for her first novel, Negative Space. It's given to first books by novelists below the age of 35, books that provide a strong sense of atmosphere and are "of a romantic, traditional nature." Past winners have included Zadie Smith and Alex Garland. Negative Space is about a woman who loses her brother to a brain tumour. His death robs her life of all meaning - the flat that brother and sister shared, and even the windswept streets, echo with the hollowness loss leaves behind.

It's the wind sweeping through small towns and the obsession of doomed relationships that Zoë is so adept at describing. Spin Cycle, her washing machine novel, continues that vein, exploring the everyday lives of three women who work in a laundromat. "Play Dead," an old fashioned story of seduction told with a bold, in-your-face twist, takes that exploration of urban realism a step further. Where attitudes are concerned, it is very much a story of today, but its background and passion remain timeless.