About the author
Roy Sharples is the Founder, President and Chief Creative Officer of Unknown Origins on a mission to unlock everyones creative potential.
Manifesto
Manifesto
ALCHEMY OF THE IMPERFECTIONISTS
A darkly comic literary novel exploring creativity, ambition, identity,
and the cost of success in an algorithmic age.
Meaning Doesn't Arrive. It Survives.
Alchemy of the Imperfectionists is a darkly comic, emotionally unfiltered debut novel exploring identity, ambition, and the exquisite cost of turning creativity into currency.
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The novel follows Argyle Mackintosh, a celebrated art–tech founder who returns to rain-slicked Edinburgh burned out by success and haunted by the suspicion that the genius the world applauded may never have existed at all. Drawn back into the orbit of his former chosen family at The Nude Male—a half-mythic café populated by misfits, rivals, and truth-tellers—Argyle is forced into a reckoning with the friendships, compromises, and selves he left behind.
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Blending biting satire with lyrical introspection, Alchemy of the Imperfectionists examines creativity as performance, success as spectacle, and imperfection as something increasingly engineered out of modern life. Wickedly funny and quietly devastating, it is a novel about the violence of friendship, the seduction of ambition, and the strange, almost holy relief of becoming real.
Roy Sharples
Writes from the edges—where creative ambition collides with doubt, and imperfection becomes a kind of truth. His work explores identity, creativity, and the performance of success in an increasingly algorithmic age.
From startup chaos to global boardrooms, he has shaped ideas and narratives at the intersection of technology, art, and culture. Alchemy of the Imperfectionists is his debut novel.
