John William Polidori
John William Polidori was an Italian English physician and writer, known for his associations with the Romantic movement and credited by some as the creator of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction.
Polidori was the oldest son of Gaetano Polidori, an Italian political émigré scholar, and Anna Maria Pierce, a governess. He had three brothers and four sisters.
He was one of the earliest pupils at recently established Ampleforth College from 1804, and in 1810 went up to the University of Edinburgh, where he wrote a thesis on sleepwalking and received his degree as a doctor of medicine on 1 August 1815 at the age of 19.
In 1816 Dr. Polidori entered Lord Byron's service as his personal physician, and accompanied Byron on a trip through Europe. At th
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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Mary Shelley (née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, often known as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley) was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, travel writer, and editor of the works of her husband, Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. She was the daughter of the political philosopher William Godwin and the writer, philosopher, and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
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Mary Shelley was taken seriously as a writer in her own lifetime, though reviewers often missed the political edge to her novels. After her death, however, she was chiefly remembered only as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and as the author of Frankenstein. It was not until 1989, when Emily Sunstein published her prizewinning biography Mary Shel -
Mary MacLane
Mary MacLane was a controversial Canadian-born American writer whose frank memoirs helped usher in the confessional style of autobiographical writing. MacLane was known as the "Wild Woman of Butte."
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MacLane was a very popular author for her time, scandalizing the populace with her shocking bestselling first memoir and to a lesser extent her two following books. She was considered wild and uncontrolled, a reputation she nurtured, and was openly bisexual as well as a vocal feminist. In her writings, she compared herself to another frank young memoirist, Marie Bashkirtseff, who died a few years after MacLane was born, and H. L. Mencken called her "the Butte Bashkirtseff." -
Charlotte Dacre
Most commonly known as Charlotte Dacre, she was born Charlotte King in either 1771 or 1772. She published fiction, poetry, and lyrics, alternately using the names Charlotte King, Rosa Matilda, and Charlotte Dacre.
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She married Nicholas Byrne, editor of the Morning Post, and her obituary in 1825 referred to her as Charlotte Byrne.
Today, she is known for her contributions to Gothic fiction, most notably with Zofloya. -
Nennius
Nennius — or Nemnius or Nemnivus — was a Welsh monk of the 9th century. He has traditionally been attributed with the authorship of the Historia Brittonum, based on the prologue affixed to that work, This attribution is widely considered a secondary (10th century) tradition.
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The Historia Brittonum was highly influential, becoming a major contributor to the Arthurian legend, in particular for its inclusion of events relevant to debate about the historicity of King Arthur. It also includes the legendary origins of the Picts, Scots, St. Germanus and Vortigern, and documents events associated with the Anglo-Saxon invasion of the 7th century as contributed by a Northumbrian document.
Nennius was a student of Elvodugus, commonly identified with the -
Amelia B. Edwards
Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards (1831-1892) was an English novelist, journalist, lady traveller and Egyptologist, born to an Irish mother and a father who had been a British Army officer before becoming a banker. Edwards was educated at home by her mother, showing considerable promise as a writer at a young age. She published her first poem at the age of 7, her first story at age 12. Edwards thereafter proceeded to publish a variety of poetry, stories and articles in a large number of magazines.
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Edwards' first full-length novel was My Brother's Wife (1855). Her early novels were well received, but it was Barbara's History (1864), a novel of bigamy, that solidly established her reputation as a novelist. She spent considerable time and effort on -
Wendy Moore
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Wendy Moore worked as a journalist and freelance writer for more than 25 years. She has always been interested in history, and as a result, began researching the history of medicine.
The Knife Man is her first book. -
David J. Skal
David J. Skal became fascinated with monsters at the height of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when indestructible monsters like Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man provided a "nuclear security blanket" for a whole generation of youngsters.
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Active as an editor and reporter on his high school newspaper, he was granted a journalism scholarship to Ohio University, Athens, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1974. His work as film critic, arts reporter, arts editor and assistant managing editor of the Ohio University Post, one of the country's leading college papers,led to his three-season appointment as publicity director of the University-operated Monomoy Theatre on Cape Cod. Following his graduation, he served as a public affairs intern -
W.F. Harvey
William Fryer Harvey was an English writer of short stories, most notably in the macabre and horror genres. Among his best-known stories are "August Heat" and "The Beast with Five Fingers", described by horror historian Les Daniels as "minor masterpieces".
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Born into a wealthy Quaker family in Yorkshire, he attended the Quaker schools at Bootham in Yorkshire and at Leighton Park in Reading before going on to Balliol College, Oxford. He took a degree in medicine at Leeds. Ill health dogged him, however, and he devoted himself to personal projects such as his first book of short stories, Midnight House (1910).
In World War I he initially joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit, but later served as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and received -
Théophile Gautier
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and literary critic. In the 1830 Revolution, he chose to stay with friends in the Doyenné district of Paris, living a rather pleasant bohemian life. He began writing poetry as early as 1826 but the majority of his life was spent as a contributor to various journals, mainly for La Presse, which also gave him the opportunity for foreign travel and meeting many influential contacts in high society and in the world of the arts, which inspired many of his writings including Voyage en Espagne (1843), Trésors d'Art de la Russie (1858), and Voyage en Russie (1867). He was a celebrated abandonnée of the Romantic Ballet, writing several scenarios, the most famous of wh
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Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, and attended Mount Holyoke College (then, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary) in South Hadley, Massachusetts, for one year, from 1870–71. Freeman's parents were orthodox Congregationalists, causing her to have a very strict childhood.
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Religious constraints play a key role in some of her works. She later finished her education at West Brattleboro Seminary. She passed the greater part of her life in Massachusetts and Vermont.
Freeman began writing stories and verse for children while still a teenager to help support her family and was quickly successful. Her best known work was written in the 1880s and 1890s while she lived in Randolph. She produced more than two dozen volumes of publ -
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Mary Elizabeth Braddon was a British Victorian era popular novelist. She was an extremely prolific writer, producing some 75 novels with very inventive plots. The most famous one is her first novel, Lady Audley's Secret (1862), which won her recognition and fortune as well. The novel has been in print ever since, and has been dramatised and filmed several times.
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Braddon also founded Belgravia Magazine (1866), which presented readers with serialized sensation novels, poems, travel narratives, and biographies, as well as essays on fashion, history, science. She also edited Temple Bar Magazine. Braddon's legacy is tied to the Sensation Fiction of the 1860s.
She is also the mother of novelist W.B. Maxwell. -
Nicholas Drayson
Nicholas Drayson has written extensively about wildlife and natural history and is the author of the novels Confessing a Murder, which was hailed by Booklist for its "view of Darwin never before seen", Love and the Platypus and A Guide to the Beasts of East Africa. An Englishman by birth, Drayson has worked as a journalist in the UK, Kenya and Australia, writing for publications such as the Daily Telegraph and Australian Geographic. He has lived in Australia since 1982, where he received a Ph.D. from the University of New South Wales.
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Basil Thomson
Sir Basil Home Thomson, KCB (21 April 1861 – 26 March 1939) was a British intelligence officer, police officer, prison governor, colonial administrator, and writer.
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abridged from Wikipedia -
Maria Janion
Literature historian, literature critic, famous feminist. A professor at The Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences specialising in romanticism.
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Fabián Plaza Miranda
Soy escritor y abogado especialista en Derecho de Nuevas Tecnologías y Derecho Internacional. Me he pasado la vida dando vueltas por el mundo, desde mi Madrid natal hasta Barcelona, pasando por Houston, Sabadell, Túnez, Palma de Mallorca... para finalmente instalarme en Vigo y disfrutar de la belleza de Galicia.
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Tengo un Posgrado en Estudios Internacionales, otro de Especialista en Asia Oriental y un Máster en Estudios de Asia Oriental. Todo ello, junto al hecho de que hablo con fluidez varios idiomas, convierte en eufemismo el decir que me encanta cualquier cosa internacional. Y lo asiático en particular, añado.
Llevo escribiendo desde los quince años, pero empecé a hacerlo de forma más o menos seria a comienzos de este siglo. Así fue como l -
Arthur Machen
Arthur Machen was a leading Welsh author of the 1890s. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His long story The Great God Pan made him famous and controversial in his lifetime, but The Hill of Dreams is generally considered his masterpiece. He also is well known for his leading role in creating the legend of the Angels of Mons.
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At the age of eleven, Machen boarded at Hereford Cathedral School, where he received an excellent classical education. Family poverty ruled out attendance at university, and Machen was sent to London, where he sat exams to attend medical school but failed to get in. Machen, however, showed literary promise, publishing in 1881 a long poem "Eleusinia" on the subject of the Eleus -
Stephen Marlowe
Aka Milton S. Lesser, Adam Chase, Andrew Frazer, Jason Ridgway, C.H. Thames.
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Stephen Marlowe (1928–2008) was the author of more than fifty novels, including nearly two dozen featuring globe-trotting private eye Chester Drum. Born Milton Lesser, Marlowe was raised in Brooklyn and attended the College of William and Mary. After several years writing science fiction under his given name, he legally adopted his pen name, and began focusing on Chester Drum, the Washington-based detective who first appeared in The Second Longest Night (1955).
Although a private detective akin to Raymond Chandler’s characters, Drum was distinguished by his jet-setting lifestyle, which carried him to various exotic locales from Mecca to South America. These espionage -
Markandeya
Markandeya (Sanskrit: मार्कण्डेय) is an ancient rishi (sage) from the Hindu tradition, born in the clan of Brigu Rishi. He is celebrated as a devotee of both Shiva and Vishnu and is mentioned in a number of stories from the Puranas. The Markandeya Purana especially, comprises a dialogue between Markandeya and a sage called Jaimini and a number of chapters in the Bhagavata Purana are dedicated to his conversations and prayers. He is also mentioned in the Mahabharata. Markandeya is venerated within all mainstream Hindu traditions.
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Francisco Coloane
"The Jack London of South America"
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He was born in the southern Chilean island of Chiloé. Among his most famous works (translated into English, French, Italian, Greek, German, Polish and Dutch) are: "La Tierra del Fuego se Apagó" (Tierra del Fuego Has Burnt Out, 1945), "Golfo de Penas" (Gulf of Sorrow, 1957), "El Camino de la Ballena" (The Whale's Path, 1962), "El Guanaco Blanco" (The White Guanaco, 1980), and "El Corazón del Témpano" (The Heart of the Iceberg, 1991).
Coloane was awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura (Chilean National Prize for Literature) in 1964. In 1997, he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) by the French Republic, where he won considerable notoriety for his work in the 1990s.
Coloa -
Richard Thomson
Richard Thomson (1794–1865) was an English librarian and antiquary. He contributed much on cataloguing the London institution library, as well as the antiquities found in excavations in London. Aside from his historical writings, he is known for his fiction work, where his story "The Wehr Wolf" is considered the first published werewolf tale, as well as works of poetry.
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Clara Reeve
Reeve was born in Ipswich, England, one of the eight children of Reverend Willian Reeve, M.A., Rector of Freston and of Kreson in Suffolk, and perpetual curate of St Nicholas. Her mother's maiden name was Smithies, daughter of a Smithies, a goldsmith and jeweller to King George I. In a letter to one of her friends Reeve said the following of her father and her early life:
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My father was an old Whig; from him I have learned all that I know; he was my oracle; he used to make me read the Parliamentary debates, while he smoked his pipe after supper. I gaped and yawned over them at the time, but, unawares to myself, they fixed my principles once and for all. He made me read Rapin's History of England; the information it gave made amends for its d -
Florence Marryat
British author and actress, daughter of author Capt. Frederick Marryat (Children of the The New Forest), particularly known for her sensational novels and her involvement with several celebrated spiritual mediums of the late nineteenth century. Her works include There is No Death (1891) and The Spirit World (1894).
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Marryat's parents separated when she was young; her childhood was divided between her parents' residences, where she was privately educated.
Shortly before her 21st birthday, she wed Thomas Ross Church, an officer in the Madras staff corps of the British Army in India; they spent the first seven years of their married life traveling India extensively before she returned to England in 1860. They had eight children but divorced in 18 -
Christina Stead
Christina Stead (1902–1983) was an Australian writer regarded as one of the twentieth century’s master novelists. Stead spent most of her writing life in Europe and the United States, and her varied residences acted as the settings for a number of her novels. She is best known for The Man Who Loved Children (1940), which was praised by author Jonathan Franzen as a “crazy, gorgeous family novel” and “one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century.” Stead died in her native Australia in 1983.
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Sonia Sulaiman
Sonia Sulaiman is a Pushcart nominated, BNW and Lammy finalist author. She writes short speculative fiction inspired by Palestinian folklore. Her work has appeared in ArabLit Quarterly, Beladi, FANTASY, FIYAH Literary Magazine, Lackington's Magazine, and Speculatively Queer's Xencultivars anthology.
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Count Stenbock
Count Eric Stanislaus (or Stanislaus Eric) Stenbock was a Baltic German poet and writer of macabre fantastic fiction. He was a symbol of his age, poet, decadent, short story writer, a true member of the aristocracy who mixed with the Socialists and radicals of the late Nineteenth Century. In his time he was known as a 'drunkard, poet, pervert, most charming of men' a description which serves to confuse more than illuminate. Stenbock's life in Brighton, London and Estonia gives us a window on to the complicated worlds of literature, art and fashion which characterised the late Nineteenth Century.
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Stenbock was the count of Bogesund and the heir to an estate near Kolga in Estonia. He was the son of Lucy Sophia Frerichs, a Manchester cotton heir -
Hanns Heinz Ewers
Hanns Heinz Ewers (1871-1943) was a German actor, poet, philosopher, and writer of short stories and novels. While he wrote on a wide range of subjects, he is today known chiefly for his works of horror, particularly his trilogy of novels centered around the adventures of Frank Braun, a character modeled not too loosely on himself.
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Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, and attended Mount Holyoke College (then, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary) in South Hadley, Massachusetts, for one year, from 1870–71. Freeman's parents were orthodox Congregationalists, causing her to have a very strict childhood.
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Religious constraints play a key role in some of her works. She later finished her education at West Brattleboro Seminary. She passed the greater part of her life in Massachusetts and Vermont.
Freeman began writing stories and verse for children while still a teenager to help support her family and was quickly successful. Her best known work was written in the 1880s and 1890s while she lived in Randolph. She produced more than two dozen volumes of publ -
Leslie S. Klinger
Leslie S. Klinger is considered to be one of the world’s foremost authorities on those twin icons of the Victorian era, Sherlock Holmes and Dracula. He is the editor of the three-volume collection of the short stories and novels, THE NEW ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES, published by W. W. Norton in 2004 and 2005, winner of the Edgar® Award for Best Critical/Biographical Work and nominated for every other major award in the mystery genre. THE NEW ANNOTATED DRACULA, published by W. W. Norton in 2008, delivers promises a similar in-depth examination of Bram Stoker’s haunting classic and its historical context.
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Since the 1960’s, the study of the rich fantastic literature of the Victorian writers has been Klinger’s consuming passion. He has written doz -
Brigitte Knightley
Brigitte writes what she wants to read: enemies-to-lovers romances that put the unresolved back in UST. Her debut novel, THE IRRESISTIBLE URGE TO FALL FOR YOUR ENEMY, is coming out July 2025 (Berkley / Orbit UK).
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Instagram: @brigitteknightley
Newsletter signups: brigitteknightley.com
Author illustration by @gingerhuneybee. -
Johanna van Veen
Johanna van Veen grew up in the Netherlands with her two sisters. She received an MA in English Literature with a specialization in early modern literature, as well as an MA Book and Digital Media with a specialization in early modern book history.
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Sylvie Cathrall
Sylvie Cathrall writes stories of hope and healing with healthy doses of wonder and whimsy. She holds a graduate degree in odd Victorian art and has handled more than a few nineteenth-century letters (with great care). Sylvie married her former pen pal and lives in the mountains, where she dresses impractically and dreams of the sea.
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You can find Sylvie on Instagram @sylviecathrall.
Author's portrait by Inês Dinis: @inestheunicorn. -
Julie Soto
JULIE SOTO is a USA Today bestselling author, playwright, and actress originally from Sacramento, CA. Her musical Generation Me won the 2017 New York Musical Festival’s Best Musical award, as well as Best Book for her script. She is a musical theater geek, fandom nerd, and the author of many spicy fan fictions. Julie now lives in Fort Bragg, CA, with her dog, Charlie. She is probably drinking coffee as you read this.
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Isabel Cañas
Isabel Cañas is a Mexican American speculative fiction writer. After having lived in Mexico, Scotland, Egypt, Turkey, and New York City, among other places, she has settled in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and writes fiction inspired by her research and her heritage.
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Matthew Gregory Lewis
Matthew Gregory Lewis was an English novelist and dramatist, often referred to as "Monk" Lewis, because of the success of his classic Gothic novel, The Monk.
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Matthew Gregory Lewis was the firstborn child of Matthew and Frances Maria Sewell Lewis. Both his parents' families had connections with Jamaica. Lewis' father owned considerable property in Jamaica, within four miles of Savanna-la-Mer, or Savanna-la-Mar, which was hit by a devastating earthquake and hurricane in 1779. Lewis would later inherit this property.
In addition to Matthew Gregory Lewis, Matthew and Frances had three other children: Maria, Barrington, and Sophia Elizabeth. On 23 July 1781, when Matthew was six and his youngest sister was one and a half years old, Frances left he -
Edgar Allan Poe
The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.
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Just as the bizarre c -
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of English literature. He was greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Nabokov.
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Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write within their narrow definition of literature. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the Western canon. -
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Letitia Elizabeth Landon was an English poet and novelist, better known by her initials L.E.L.
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Charlotte Dacre
Most commonly known as Charlotte Dacre, she was born Charlotte King in either 1771 or 1772. She published fiction, poetry, and lyrics, alternately using the names Charlotte King, Rosa Matilda, and Charlotte Dacre.
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She married Nicholas Byrne, editor of the Morning Post, and her obituary in 1825 referred to her as Charlotte Byrne.
Today, she is known for her contributions to Gothic fiction, most notably with Zofloya. -
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870) was a writer and social critic who created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime, and by the twentieth century critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories enjoy lasting popularity.
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Dickens left school to work in a factory when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. Despite his lack of formal education, he edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels, five novellas, hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaign -
Théophile Gautier
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and literary critic. In the 1830 Revolution, he chose to stay with friends in the Doyenné district of Paris, living a rather pleasant bohemian life. He began writing poetry as early as 1826 but the majority of his life was spent as a contributor to various journals, mainly for La Presse, which also gave him the opportunity for foreign travel and meeting many influential contacts in high society and in the world of the arts, which inspired many of his writings including Voyage en Espagne (1843), Trésors d'Art de la Russie (1858), and Voyage en Russie (1867). He was a celebrated abandonnée of the Romantic Ballet, writing several scenarios, the most famous of wh
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Lord Byron
George Gordon Byron (invariably known as Lord Byron), later Noel, 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale FRS was a British poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Amongst Byron's best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we'll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential, both in the English-speaking world and beyond.
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Byron's notabilty rests not only on his writings but also on his life, which featured upper-class living, numerous love affairs, debts, and separation. He was notably described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". Byron served as -
Ann Radcliffe
Ann Ward Radcliffe of Britain wrote Gothic novels, including The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).
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This English author pioneered.
William Radcliffe, her father and a haberdasher, moved the family to Bath to manage a china shop in 1772. Radcliffe occasionally lived with her uncle, Thomas Bentley, in Chelsea in partnership with a fellow Unitarian, Josiah Wedgwood. Although mixing in some distinguished circles, Radcliffe seemingly made little impression in this society, and Wedgwood described her as "Bentley's shy niece."
In 1787, she married William Radcliffe, the Oxford graduate and journalist. He often came home late, and to occupy her time, she began to write and read her work when he returned. They enjoyed a childless but seemingly happy ma -
Jeff VanderMeer
NYT bestselling writer Jeff VanderMeer has been called “the weird Thoreau” by the New Yorker for his engagement with ecological issues. His most recent novel, the national bestseller Borne, received wide-spread critical acclaim and his prior novels include the Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance). Annihilation won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, has been translated into 35 languages, and was made into a film from Paramount Pictures directed by Alex Garland. His nonfiction has appeared in New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Salon, and the Washington Post. He has coedited several iconic anthologies with his wife, the Hugo Award winning editor. Other titles include Wonderbook, the worl
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J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels. He was the leading ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century and was central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era. M.R. James described Le Fanu as "absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories". Three of his best-known works are Uncle Silas, Carmilla and The House by the Churchyard.
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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Mary Shelley (née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, often known as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley) was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, travel writer, and editor of the works of her husband, Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. She was the daughter of the political philosopher William Godwin and the writer, philosopher, and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
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Mary Shelley was taken seriously as a writer in her own lifetime, though reviewers often missed the political edge to her novels. After her death, however, she was chiefly remembered only as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and as the author of Frankenstein. It was not until 1989, when Emily Sunstein published her prizewinning biography Mary Shel -
H.P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, of Providence, Rhode Island, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction.
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Lovecraft's major inspiration and invention was cosmic horror: life is incomprehensible to human minds and the universe is fundamentally alien. Those who genuinely reason, like his protagonists, gamble with sanity. Lovecraft has developed a cult following for his Cthulhu Mythos, a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a pantheon of human-nullifying entities, as well as the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works were deeply pessimistic and cynical, challenging the values of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Christianity. Lovecraft's protagonists usually achieve the mir -
Horace Walpole
Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford — also known as Horace Walpole — was an English art historian, man of letters, antiquarian and Whig politician. He is now largely remembered for Strawberry Hill, the home he built in Twickenham, south-west London where he revived the Gothic style some decades before his Victorian successors, and for his Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto. Along with the book, his literary reputation rests on his Letters, which are of significant social and political interest. He was the son of Sir Robert Walpole, and cousin of Lord Nelson.
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Henry James
Henry James was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
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He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady. His later works, such as The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in -
Nick Groom
Nick Groom, known as the “Prof of Goth,” is professor of English at Exeter University, UK. His previous titles include The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction, and The Seasons: A Celebration of the English Year, which was shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award and came runner-up for BBC Countryfile Book of the Year.
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was an English poet, critic, and philosopher who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and one of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as his major prose work Biographia Literaria.
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Bethesda Softworks
Bethesda Softworks LLC is an American video game publisher based in Rockville, Maryland. The company was founded by Christopher Weaver in 1986 as a division of Media Technology Limited, and in 1999 became a subsidiary of ZeniMax Media. In its first fifteen years, it was a video game developer and self-published its titles. In 2001, Bethesda spun off its own in-house development team into Bethesda Game Studios, and Bethesda Softworks became a publisher only. It currently also publishes games by ZeniMax Online Studios, id Software, Arkane Studios, MachineGames, Tango Gameworks and Bethesda Game Studios Austin.
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Robert W. Chambers
Robert William Chambers was an American artist and writer.
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Chambers was first educated at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute,and then entered the Art Students' League at around the age of twenty, where the artist Charles Dana Gibson was his fellow student. Chambers studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, and at Académie Julian, in Paris from 1886 to 1893, and his work was displayed at the Salon as early as 1889. On his return to New York, he succeeded in selling his illustrations to Life, Truth, and Vogue magazines. Then, for reasons unclear, he devoted his time to writing, producing his first novel, In the Quarter (written in 1887 in Munich). His most famous, and perhaps most meritorious, effort is The King in Yellow, a collection of weird sho -
F. Marion Crawford
Francis Marion Crawford (1854-1909) was an American writer noted for his many novels. He was born at Bagni di Lucca, Italy. In 1879 he went to India, where he studied Sanskrit and edited the Allahabad Indian Herald. Returning to America he continued to study Sanskrit at Harvard University for a year, contributed to various periodicals, and in 1882 produced his first novel, Mr Isaacs. This book had an immediate success, and its author's promise was confirmed by the publication of Doctor Claudius: A True Story (1883). After a brief residence in New York and Boston, in 1883 he returned to Italy, where he made his permanent home. He also published the historical works, Ave Roma Immortalis (1898), Rulers of the South (1900) renamed Sicily, Calab
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Pedro Antonio de Alarcón
Pedro Antonio de Alarcón y Ariza was a 19th century Spanish novelist, author of the novel El Sombrero de Tres Picos (The Three-Cornered Hat, 1874). The story is an adaptation of a popular tradition and provides a lively picture of village life in Alarcón's native region of Andalusia. It was the basis for Hugo Wolf's opera Der Corregidor (1897) and Manuel de Falla's ballet The Three-Cornered Hat (1919).
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Alarcón wrote another popular short novel, El capitán Veneno ('Captain Poison', 1881). He produced four other full-length novels. One of these novels, El escándalo ('The Scandal', 1875), became noted for its keen psychological insights. Alarcón also wrote three travel books and many short stories and essays.
Alarcón was born in Guadix, near Gra -
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Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy
Count Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, often referred to as A.K. Tolstoy (Russian: Алексей Константинович Толстой), was a Russian poet, novelist and playwright, considered to be the most important nineteenth-century Russian historical dramatist. He also gained fame for his satirical works, published under his own name (History of the Russian State from Gostomysl to Timashev, The Dream of Councillor Popov) and under the collaborational pen name of Kozma Prutkov.
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A.K. Tolstoy was born in Saint Petersburg to the famed family of Tolstoy. His father, Count Konstantin Petrovich Tolstoy (1780–1870), a son of the army general, was a Russian state assignation bank councilor. His mother, Anna Alekseyevna Perovskaya (1796–1857), was an illegitimate dau -
Kenan Hulûsi Koray
Hikaye yazarı. İstanbul Erkek Lisesi’ni bitirdikten sonra İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi’ne devam etti.
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Öğrencilik yıllarında ilk hikayelerini “Servet-i Fünün” dergisinde yayınlayarak edebiyat dünyasına adım attı. Aynı dergiye yazan diğer altı arkadaşı ile birlikte, edebiyatımızda "Yedi Meşaleciler" adıyla anılan topluluğu oluşturdular. Kenan Hulûsi, içlerindeki tek hikâye yazarıydı. 1928 yılında önce bir antoloji, ardından da bir dergi hazırlayarak çıkış yapan ve Sabri Esat Siyavuşgil, Ziya Osman Saba, Yaşar Nabi Nayır, Muammer Lütfi, Vasfi Mahir Kocatürk, Cevdet Kudret ve Kenan Hulûsi'den oluşan topluluk, milli edebiyatçıların sığlıklarına, gerçekçilikten kopmuş ve içi boşalmış "milli"liklerine bir tepkiyi dillendiriyordu. Ancak -
Ty Templeton
Tyrone Templeton is a Canadian comic book artist and writer who has drawn a number of mainstream titles, TV-associated titles, and his own series.
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He is the brother of internet pioneer and entrepreneur Brad Templeton, and son of Canadian celebrities Charles Templeton and Sylvia Murphy. He lives in Ontario, Canada. -
Robert Boswell
Robert Boswell is the author of eleven books, including The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, a story collection with Graywolf Press, in April 2009. His novels: Century's Son, American Owned Love, Mystery Ride, The Geography of Desire, and Crooked Hearts. His other story collections: Living to Be 100 and Dancing in the Movies. His nonfiction: The Half-Known World, a book on the craft of writing, and What Men Call Treasure: The Search for Gold at Victorio Peak, a book about a real-life treasure hunt in New Mexico (co-written with David Schweidel). His cyberpunk novel Virtual Death (published under the pseudonym Shale Aaron) was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award.
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His play Tongues won the John Gassner Prize. He has received two Nationa -
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Letitia Elizabeth Landon was an English poet and novelist, better known by her initials L.E.L.
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John Berwick Harwood
John Berwick Harwood was an English writer, best known for his ghost stories. He wrote many (usually anonymous) stories and articles, some of them about his experiences in China. He contributed short stories to Once a Week, Cassell's Family Magazine, Blackwood's Magazine and the Cornhill Magazine. He wrote about twenty novels and several Christmas horror tales.
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Lisa Schneidau
Lisa Schneidau is a performance storyteller, author and environmentalist living in Devon. She specialises in traditional stories about land, sea and sky from all over the world.
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Lisa uses story to explore our connections with the natural world. She works with schools, communities and organisations across the UK and beyond. She also holds workshops and story walks to encourage the development of storytelling skills in nature education and rewilding projects. You'll find more details of current projects and events on her website.
Lisa is the bestselling author of three books of British and Irish folk tales published by the History Press:
Botanical Folk Tales of Britain and Ireland, in paperback, ebook and audiobook;
Woodland Folk Tales of Brita -
Aemilia Lanyer
Aemilia Lanyer (1569-1645) was born to Margaret Johnson and Baptista Basano. She would become a well known woman and poet years after she published a volume of religious poems in 1611. She grew up in the height of Elizabethan power but lived her adult life under the reign of James I during his move towards a strictly patriarchal society. Aemilia Lanyer was an influential poet because she was the first English woman to have her book of poems, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, published. This book challenged the thoughts on gender and ideology of the time.
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Little is known about Lanyer’s family or her life. There are multiple leads in her family tree and even their religious background. A.L. Rowse believes Lanyer’s family was actually Jewish based on r -
Karl Friedrich Kahlert
Karl Friedrich Kahlert, born in Breslau, Prussia (now Wrocław in Poland). Prussian writer.
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Also wrote under:
- Lawrence Flammenberg
- Lorenz Flammenberg
- Bernhard Stein -
James Malcolm Rymer
James Malcolm Rymer was a British nineteenth century writer of penny dreadfuls, and is the probable author of Varney the Vampire, often attributed to fellow writer Thomas Peckett Prest, and co-author (with Prest) of The String of Pearls, in which the notorious villain Sweeney Todd makes his literary debut.
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Information about Rymer is sketchy. In the London Directory for 1841 he is listed as a civil engineer, living at 42 Burton Street, and the British Museum catalogue mentions him in 1842 as editing the Queen's Magazine. Between 1842 to the 1867 he wrote up to 115 popular novels for the English bookseller and publisher, Edward Lloyd, including the best-sellers Ada the Betrayed, Varney the Vampyre and The String of Pearls. Rymer's novels appea -
Madeleine Bourdouxhe
Madeleine Bourdouxhe moved from Liège to Paris in 1914 with her parents, where she lived for the duration of World War I. After returning to Brussels, she studied philosophy. In 1927 she married a mathematics teacher, Jacques Muller. The marriage lasted until his death in 1974. Her daughter was born the day the Germans invaded Belgium in May 1940. She fled with her husband to a small village near Bordeaux, but was forced by the government in exile to return to Brussels, and remained there, active in the Belgian Resistance.
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After the war, she lived regularly in Paris and had contact with writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Raymond Queneau and Jean-Paul Sartre, and also with painters such as René Magritte and Paul Delvaux. Her last novel, 'A l -
Paul Zanker
Paul Zanker is the professor of Storia dell’Arte Antica at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. Previously Zanker was professor of classical archaeology at the University of Munich (1976–2002) and the University of Göttingen (1972–1976). He is a noted expert on Roman art and archaeology and a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, of the Academia Europaea, of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, the Pontifical Academy of Archaeology and of the German Archaeological Institute. From 1990 to 1991 he was the Sather professor of the University of California at Berkeley. Zanker is head of the German Commission for the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum.
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Quintus Smyrnaeus
Quintus Smyrnaeus, also known as Kointos Smyrnaios (Greek: Κόϊντος Σμυρναῖος), was a Greek epic poet whose Posthomerica, following "after Homer" continues the narration of the Trojan War.
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The dates of Smyrnaeus's life are controversial, but they are traditionally placed in the latter part of the 4th century AD. -
Lionel White
Lionel White was a crime reporter who wrote around 38 suspenseful thrillers beginning with The Snatchers in 1953 and ending with The Walled Yard in 1978.
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Most of his books were translated into a number of different languages and his earlier novels were published as Gold Medal pulp hard-boiled crime fiction, but when Duttons began a line of mystery and suspense books, he also wrote for them.
He was most well known for what a New York Times review described as "the master of the big caper."
A number of his books were made into movies and Stanley Kubrick liked his book 'Clean Break' (1955) so much that he licensed the rights for his film "The Killing" in 1956.
In Quentin Tarantino's film "Reservoir Dogs", Lionel White is listed as an inspiration -
Stephen Skinner
Dr. Stephen Skinner, Ph.D. (Classics, University of Newcastle, 2014) author, editor, publisher, and lecturer. He is known for authoring books on magic, feng shui, sacred geometry, and alchemy. He has published more than 46 books in more than 20 languages.
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Sarah Fielding
Sarah Fielding was a British author and sister of the novelist Henry Fielding. She was the author of The Governess, or The Little Female Academy (1749), which was the first novel in English written especially for children (children's literature), and had earlier achieved success with her novel The Adventures of David Simple (1744).
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F.G. Loring
Frederick George Loring (1869–1951) was an English naval officer and writer, and an early expert in wireless telegraphy.
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Loring's writing abilities appeared first as a technical journalist and as naval correspondent for the Western Morning News.
Loring also wrote poetry and short stories, of which "The Tomb of Sarah" gained acclaim as a classic vampire story after it appeared in volume XXII of Pall Mall Magazine in 1900. It tells what happens when the tomb of the evil Countess Sarah, murdered in 1630, is disturbed during the restoration of a church. Along with Hume Nisbet's "The Vampire Maid" and E. F. Benson's "Mrs. Amworth", it is among the foremost early 20th-century stories to feature a female vampire.
The story soon began to be anthologiz -
Al Feldstein
Albert Bernard Feldstein was an American writer, editor, and artist, best known for his work at EC Comics and, from 1956 to 1985, as the editor of the satirical magazine Mad. After retiring from Mad, Feldstein concentrated on American paintings of Western wildlife.
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Alice Askew
Alice Jane de Courcy Leake Askew
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aka
Alice Askew
She was part of the husband-and-wife team of Alice and Claude Askew, both of whom perished when their passenger ship was torpedoed during the Great War in 1917. Askew was co-author of the Aylmer Vance stories wherein the protagonist, Vance, undertakes investigations on behalf of the ‘Ghost Circle’ and regularly exposes false mediums and the like. -
Emmanuelle Arsan
Emmanuelle Arsan, née Marayat Bibidh, aussi Marayat, Marajat, Kramsaseddinsh, Krasaesundh, Krassaesibor, Virajjakkam, Virajjakam, Virajjakari, Rollet-Andriane, Bibidh. Née en 1932 ou en 1940 à Bangkok, romancière française d'origine thaïlandaise. (French novelist of thaï origin)
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Joseph Michael Reynolds
Joseph Michael Reynolds is an author and journalist who has covered major crimes and domestic and international terrorism for Playboy, the Nation, U.S. News & World Report, Mother Jones, and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and contributed to the television shows 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, and Dateline. As a Reuters correspondent in Florida, Reynolds broke the story of female serial killer Aileen Wuornos in 1990, and wrote about her trial, conviction, and execution in his book Dead Ends. His writing has also been featured in several anthologies, including The Playboy Book of True Crime, Annual Editions: Violence and Terrorism, and Fascism: Critical Concepts in Political Science.
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Fiona Sampson
Fiona Ruth Sampson, MBE is an English poet and writer. She is published in thirty-seven languages and has received a number of national and international awards for her writing.
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Sampson was educated at the Royal Academy of Music, and following a brief career as a concert violinist, studied at Oxford University, where she won the Newdigate Prize. She gained a PhD in the philosophy of language from Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. She advises internationally on creative writing in healthcare, a field whose development she pioneered in a number of projects and publications. As a young poet she was the founder-director of Poetryfest – the Aberystwyth International Poetry Festival and the founding editor of Orient Express, a journa -
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Pilar Pedraza
Escritora española. Su obra tiene dos vertientes principales: la narrativa de terror y el ensayo. Desconocida del gran público, es una escritora de culto, cuyo peculiar feminismo sadiano recuerda a la controvertida pensadora norteamericana Camille Paglia y a la novelista británica Angela Carter.
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William Gilbert
William Gilbert (20 May 1804 – 3 January 1890) was a British writer and Royal Navy surgeon. He wrote a considerable number of novels, biographies, histories, essays (especially about the dangers of alcohol and the plight of the poor) and popular fantasy stories, mostly in the 1860s and 1870s. Some of these have been reprinted in recent decades and are still available today. He is best remembered, however, as the father of dramatist W. S. Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan.
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Memo Tembelçizer
Mehmet Çilingir ya da kullandığı takma adla Memo Tembelçizer 1972'de İstanbul'da doğduktan sonra, lise öğrenimini Gaziantep Anadolu Lisesi'nde yaptı. Yüksek öğrenimini yapmak üzere girdiği Mimar Sinan Üniversitesi Güzel Sanatlar Fakültesi Grafik ve Heykel bölümlerinden devamsızlık nedeniyle atıldı.
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1989'da ilk amatör karikatürleri, mizah dergisi Limon'da yayımlandı. 1990'da Pişmiş Kelle Dergisinde profesyonel olarak çalışmaya başladı. Daha sonraki yıllar içinde Gırgır, HBR Maymun, L-Manyak, Lombak, Kemik, Fermuar ve Penguen dergilerinde çalıştı. 2007'de Penguen Dergisinden ayrılarak arkadaşlarıyla birlikte Uykusuz Dergisinin kurucularından biri oldu.
Mizah dergilerinin yanı sıra gazetelerde ve ekonomi dergilerinde çalışarak resimlemeler yaptı