Biographies

Nina Allan is a writer and critic. Her novel The Rift won the BSFA Award and the Kitschies Red Tentacle, and her novelette The Art of Space Travel was a finalist for the Hugo Award. Her essays and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of venues including The Guardian, The Quietus and The TLS. Her most recent novel is Conquest, published in May 2023 by Riverrun/Quercus. Nina lives and works on the Isle of Bute, off the west coast of Scotland.

Peter Atkins is the author of the novels Morningstar, Big Thunder and Moontown and the screenplays Hellraiser II, Hellraiser III, Hellraiser IV and Wishmaster. His short fiction has appeared in several award-winning anthologies and has been selected eight times for one or more of the various Year’s Best books. His newest book is the story collection All Our Hearts Are Ghosts. Rumours of the Marvellous, his previous collection, was a finalist for the British Fantasy Award. He can be found on Facebook under his own name and on Twitter and Instagram as @limeybastard55.

J.S. Breukelaar is an American-Australian author living in Sydney with her family. Her works include the short story collection Collision: Stories and the novels The Bridge, Aletheia, American Monster, and most recently Vandal: Stories of Damage, a three-novella collaboration with Kaaron Warren and Aaron Dries. She is a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and a multiple Aurealis and Australian Ditmar Award winner, among others. Her stories, essays and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous publications including The Dark, Black Static, Fantasy, Tiny Nightmares and elsewhere, including several Year’s Bests. Described by This is Horror magazine as a ‘killer female author who is smashing boundaries with each word she writes’, Breukelaar teaches at LitReactor and at the University of Western Sydney. You can also find her at thelivingsuitcase.com, and everywhere else at @jsbreukelaar.

Simon Clark’s novels include Blood Crazy, Vampyrrhic, Darkness Demands, Stranger, Secrets of the Dead and the award-winning The Night of the Triffids, which was broadcast as a five-part drama series by BBC radio. Weird House Press has recently issued Simon’s new collection Sherlock Holmes: A Casebook of Nightmares and Monsters and a novel Sherlock Holmes: Lord of Damnation. Simon lives in Yorkshire, England, where he can be seen roaming this legend-haunted landscape with a black and white Border Collie by the name of Mylo.

Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books, most recently the story collection The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell (2021). His penultimate collection Song for the Unravelling of the World (2019) won the Shirley Jackson Award and the World Fantasy Award and was a finalist for the Ray Bradbury Prize. Other recent books include A Collapse of Horses (2016) and The Warren (2016). His novel Last Days won the ALA-RUSA award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild (IHG) Award. His 2003 collection The Wavering Knife won the IHG Award. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes, an NEA fellowship and a Guggenheim Award. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at CalArts. A new collection Good Night, Sleep Tight will be published in 2024.

Mark Gatiss has had a long and varied career as an actor, writer, director and producer. He is best known as a member of the League of Gentlemen, and as the co-creator and executive producer of the multi award-winning BBC series Sherlock, in which he played Mycroft Holmes. He both wrote for and appeared in the modern revival of Doctor Who, and was the writer and executive producer of An Adventure in Space and Time for its 50th anniversary celebrations. He also co-created the BBC and Netflix drama Dracula, and has written and directed several BBC ghost stories, including Count Magnus, The Mezzotint, Martin’s Close, The Dead Room and The Tractate Middoth. As an actor, screen work includes Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Parts 1 & 2, Operation Mincemeat, The Father, The Favourite, Christopher Robin, Gunpowder, Wolf Hall, Coalition and Game of Thrones, and on stage, Coriolanus (Donmar Warehouse), The Boys in the Band (Park/Vaudeville Theatres), Three Days in the Country (National Theatre: Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role), the title role in The Madness of George III (Nottingham Playhouse), and Jacob Marley in his own adaptation of A Christmas Carol (Nottingham Playhouse and Alexandra Palace). He has recently directed Steven Moffat’s debut play The Unfriend for the Chichester Festival Theatre, which has transferred to the Criterion Theatre in the West End.

Alyssa C. Greene’s work has appeared in Fence, Pleiades, North American Review and elsewhere. She also co-hosts Say Podcast and Die!, a podcast about the Goosebumps books, queerness, and horror. A graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, she received her MFA from the University of Utah and currently lives in New York City. Find them on Twitter as @acgreenest and on Instagram as @caffeinemotivated.

Carly Holmes lives and writes in a small village on the banks of the river Teifi in west Wales, UK. Her debut novel The Scrapbook was shortlisted for the International Rubery Book Award, and her debut story collection Figurehead was published in limited-edition hardback by Tartarus Press and reprinted in paperback by Parthian Books in 2022. Her award-winning stories have appeared in journals and anthologies such as Ambit, The Ghastling, Black Static, Uncertainties and Shadows & Tall Trees, and have twice appeared in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year series. Carly’s second novel Crow Face, Doll Face will be published by Honno in October 2023.

Amanda Cecelia Lang is a horror author and aspiring recluse from Denver, Colorado. As a die-hard scary movie nerd, her favourite things are meta-slashers, Eighties nostalgia, and the rise of a fierce final girl. Her stories currently haunt the dark corners of many popular podcasts, magazines, and anthologies, including NoSleep, Tales to Terrify, Uncharted, Dark Matter, Cast of Wonders and Mixtape: 1986. Her short story collection The Library of Broken Girls will debut in the Spring of 2025. You can follow her work at amandacecelialang.com – just don’t be surprised if she leaps out at you from the shadows.

Eric LaRocca (he/they) is the Bram Stoker Award-nominated and Splatterpunk Award-winning author of the viral sensation Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke. His other work includes You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood, We Can Never Leave This Place, They Were Here Before Us and The Trees Grew Because I Bled There. A lover of luxury fashion and an admirer of European musical theatre, Eric can often be found roaming the streets of his home city, Boston, MA, for inspiration. For more information, please follow @hystericteeth on Twitter/Instagram or visit ericlarocca.com.

Ronald Malfi is the award-winning author of several horror novels and thrillers, including the bestseller Come with Me, published by Titan Books in 2021. He is the recipient of two Independent Publisher Book Awards, the Beverly Hills Book Award, the Vincent Preis Horror Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award, and his novel Floating Staircase was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Maryland, and when he’s not writing or spending time with his family, he’s performing in the rock band VEER.

Dr. Helen Marshall is a Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing at the University of Queensland. She has won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award for her two collections of short stories. Her debut novel The Migration argued for the need to remain hopeful, even in the worst circumstances, and was one of The Guardian’s top science fiction books of the year. With her colleagues, Professor Kim Wilkins and Dr. Lisa Bennett, she runs the What If Lab at the University of Queensland, which specialises in creative arts, speculative fiction and imagination-led workshops for researchers from different backgrounds and disciplines.

Lucie McKnight Hardy’s stories have featured in a variety of publications, including Best British Short Stories 2019, The Lonely Crowd, Uncertainties IV, The New Abject, Black Static and as a limited edition chapbook from Nightjar Press. Her debut novel Water Shall Refuse Them was published by Dead Ink Books in 2019. Of her second book Dead Relatives, The Guardian said: ‘This short story collection confirms the author’s reputation in the field of literary horror.’

Mark Morris (Editor) has written and edited around forty novels, novellas, short story collections and anthologies. His script work includes audio dramas for Doctor Who, Jago & Litefoot and the Hammer Chillers series. Mark’s recent work includes the official movie tie-in novelisations of The Great Wall and (co-written with Christopher Golden) The Predator, the Obsidian Heart trilogy, and the anthologies New Fears (winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Anthology) and New Fears 2 as editor. He’s also written award-winning audio adaptations of the classic 1971 horror movie Blood on Satan’s Claw and the M.R. James ghost story ‘A View from a Hill’.

Reggie Oliver is an actor, director, playwright, illustrator and award-winning author of fiction. Published work includes six plays, three novels, an illustrated children’s book The Hauntings at Tankerton Park (Zagava, 2016), nine volumes of short stories, including Mrs. Midnight (2011 winner of the Children of the Night Award for best work of supernatural fiction), and the biography of the writer Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed (Bloomsbury, 1998). His stories have appeared in over one hundred different anthologies and three ‘selected’ editions of his stories have been published, the latest being Stages of Fear (Black Shuck Books, 2020). His ninth volume of tales A Maze for the Minotaur was published by Tartarus Press in 2021.

H.V. Patterson lives in Oklahoma, USA, and writes speculative fiction and poetry. She has work published or upcoming in Etherea Magazine, Siren’s Call and Wyldblood Press, and anthologies from Sliced Up Press, Eerie River, Creature Publishing, and Black Spot Books. Her poem Mother; Microbes was recently selected for the inaugural volume of Brave New Weird from Tenebrous Press. Though she finds rabbits cute, she’s convinced that hares are up to something. She promotes women in horror through Dreadfulesque (@Dreadfulesque on Twitter and Instagram), and you can find her on Twitter @ScaryShelley and on Instagram @hvpattersonwriter.

Sarah Read is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Bone Weaver’s Orchard, Out of Water, Root Rot, and the forthcoming The Atropine Tree. You can find her online at inkwellmonster.wordpress.com.

Angela Slatter is the author of five novels, including the 2021 Queensland Literary Awards Book of the Year finalist All the Murmuring Bones, and The Path of Thorns, which made the Oprah Daily Top 25 Fantasy Books of 2022. Her debut novel Vigil was longlisted for the 2018 Dublin Literary Award. She’s also written eleven short story collections, including The Bitterwood Bible and The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales, and three novellas. She’s won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar, two Australian Shadows Awards and seven Aurealis Awards. Her work has been translated into multiple languages. She’s collaborated with Mike Mignola on a new series from Dark Horse Comics, Castle Full of Blackbirds, set in the Hellboy Universe, and screenwriter Victoria Madden (The Kettering Incident, The Gloaming) is making a film of Angela’s novelette Finnegan’s Field. She can be located on the internet at angelaslatter.com, @AngelaSlatter (Twitter) and angelaslatter (Instagram).

Simon Strantzas is the author of Nothing is Everything (Undertow Publications, 2018), Burnt Black Suns (Hippocampus Press, 2014), Nightingale Songs (Dark Regions Press, 2011), Cold to the Touch (Tartarus Press, 2009) and Beneath the Surface (Humdrumming, 2008), is the editor of Aickman’s Heirs (Undertow Publications, 2015), Shadows Edge (Gray Friar Press, 2013), and was guest editor of The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 3 (Undertow Publications, 2016). He is also co-founder and Associate Editor of the irregular non-fiction journal Thinking Horror, and columnist for Weird Horror magazine. Collectively, he’s been a finalist for four Shirley Jackson Awards, two British Fantasy Awards and the World Fantasy Award. His stories have been reprinted in Best New Horror, The Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best Weird Fiction and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, as well as published in Nightmare, Cemetery Dance, Postscripts, The Dark and elsewhere. He lives with his wife in Toronto, Canada.

Stephen Volk is best known for being the evil mind behind BBC TV’s notorious – some say legendary – ‘Halloween hoax’ Ghostwatch and for creating the award-winning ITV paranormal drama series Afterlife starring Lesley Sharp and Andrew Lincoln. His feature screenplays include The Awakening starring Rebecca Hall, Dominic West and Imelda Staunton, William Friedkin’s The Guardian, and Ken Russell’s Gothic starring Natasha Richardson as Mary Shelley with Gabriel Byrne as Lord Byron. He was also behind ITV’s supernatural thriller Midwinter of the Spirit starring Anna Maxwell Martin and David Threlfall. For the stage he wrote The Chapel of Unrest starring Jim Broadbent and Reece Shearsmith, and won a BAFTA for Best Short Film for The Deadness of Dad starring Rhys Ifans. He is also the author of four short story collections – Dark Corners, Monsters in the Heart (which won the British Fantasy Award), The Parts We Play and Lies of Tenderness. His other books include the acclaimed Dark Masters Trilogy, which features Peter Cushing, Alfred Hitchcock and Dennis Wheatley as protagonists, while Under a Raven’s Wing sees Sherlock Holmes and Poe’s detective Dupin investigating bizarre crimes in 1870s Paris. His website is stephenvolk.net.

Ally Wilkes’s Stoker Award-nominated first novel All the White Spaces was described by Paul Tremblay as ‘heady and haunting’. Her second novel Where the Dead Wait is slated for publication in late 2023, and (writing as AV Wilkes) her first novella was recently published by Cemetery Gates Media. Ally grew up in a succession of isolated – possibly haunted – country houses and boarding schools, and after studying law at Oxford University, she went on to spend eleven years as a criminal barrister in London. Her short fiction has been published in Nightmare, Three Crows, Cloisterfox and others, as well as anthologies such as FOUND: an anthology of Found Footage Horror. Ally lives in Greenwich, London, with an anatomical human skeleton. When she isn’t reading horror, you can usually find her hanging upside-down (like a bat) on her aerial silks. You can follow Ally on Twitter @UnheimlichManvr or via her website allywilkes.com.