After fifteen years in engineering, rather than have a mid-life crisis, Peter Ray Allison became a freelance writer. Peter's work has been published by the BBC, The Guardian, The Independent and many others. In pursuit of cutting-edge stories, Peter has interviewed Professor Freeman Dyson, stepped inside a fusion reactor and asked awkward questions of several government departments. Peter is also the managing editor of Geek Pride and co-host of the Geek Pride podcast. 

Rosie Andrews was born and grew up in Liverpool, the third of twelve children. She studied History at Cambridge before becoming an English teacher. Her debut novel, The Leviathan, was an instant Sunday Times bestseller, going on to become one of the bestselling debut hardbacks of 2022, and has been shortlisted for the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award, the HWA Debut Crown Award and the Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Fiction. She lives in Hertfordshire with her husband and daughter.

Photo credit: Sally Masson

Andrew David Barker is an author and filmmaker. He was born in Derby in 1975 and is the author of The Electric, Dead Leaves, and Society Place. As a screenwriter, he has written several award-winning short films, including Laura Living Backwards and Shining Tor, along with the micro-feature, A Reckoning, which he also directed. He is also the co-screenwriter of the horror film, The Wilding, and the writer/director of the supernatural feature, The House on Lidderman Street, both upcoming. He is an Arts Council Grant recipient for his writing. He now lives in Warwickshire with his wife and daughters, trying to be a grown-up.  

Charlotte Bond is an author, freelance editor, and podcaster. Under her own name she has written within the genres of horror and dark fantasy, but she’s also worked as a ghostwriter. She edits books for individuals and publishers, and has also contributed numerous non-fiction articles to various websites. She is a co-host of the award-winning podcast, Breaking the Glass Slipper. Her micro collection The Watcher in the Woods won the British Fantasy Society’s award for Best Collection in 2021. Her novellas The Fireborne Blade and The Bloodless Princes were published by Tordotcom in 2024. She is represented by Alex Cochran. 

Darrell Buxton is the editor of 'We Belong Dead' magazine, and has also edited various books on horror movies. Darrell is currently working alongside the Treasured Films Blu-ray label, contributing filmed bonus features and text essays, and will be appearing soon as an onscreen 'talking head' in Jasper Sharp's documentary 'Splatterfest Exhumed', all about the legendary 1990 all-night film show at London's Scala Cinem 

Matthew Cheeseman is a writer, researcher and Professor of Writing and Folklore at the University of Derby. He co-convene the Folklore Without Borders research network, which seeks to embed greater diversity into UK folklore and folkloristics. He is the Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Dracula Returns to Derby. He posts as @eine on X. 

Alex Davis does a lot of things in writing, including creating and co-ordinating the UK Ghost Story Festival, now entering its fifth year. He works as a lecturer for the University of Derby and De Montfort University in both Creative Writing and Media Studies, and has run writing workshops in a wide range of capacities over the last twenty years. Currently he is also working on ongoing events such as Winter Haunts, Darkness in the Fields and the year-long Dracula Returns to Derby project. 

Rod Duncan is a novelist, screenwriter and writing mentor. His debut novel Backlash was shortlisted for the 2003 New Blood Dagger and in 2014, his novel The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award. He has recently completed a PhD on world-building and neurodiversity.  

Robert Edgar is a writer and academic. He is Professor of Writing and Popular Culture in the York Centre for Writing at York St John University, UK. His publications include Screenwriting (2009), Music, Memory and Memoir (2019), Science Fiction for Survival (2019), Adaptation for Scriptwriters (2019), Thomas Hardy and the Folk Horror Tradition (2023), Venue Stories (2023), The Routledge Companion to Folk Horror (2023 )and Horrifying Children: Hauntology and the Legacy of Children’s Television (2024).  He is currently writing on Alan Garner, hauntology and memoir, and the 18th century roots of folk horror. He is a series editor for the forthcoming Spectres, Hauntings and Horrors series with Bloomsbury. He is the convener of the Hauntology and Spectrality Research Group. 

Sarah Elliott is a writer, spoken word artist, poet and self-published author (Warrior Wisdom Sun 2022, United Under One Sun 2023). She regularly hosts writing hours and monthly flash fiction workshops with the London Writers’ Salon. Her articles, stories, and author interviews can be found on The Horror Tree website. Her work has been published in Red Rose Thorns magazine, Writing in Community anthology and Hope is a Group Project.

Sarah is currently writing a tarot-inspired collection of flash fiction, short prose and poetry. She documents her writing journey in her Substack newsletter, A Writer's Life. Sarah serves as the interviews coordinator for the Horror Tree website and is also an Editor for Trembling With Fear (Horror Tree magazine). She is a member of The British Fantasy Society.

Based in Nottingham, England, Sarah lives with her cat, Bella. A speculative fiction enthusiast, she enjoys books, films and TV series in the genre. More from Sarah here:
https://sarahelliott-writer.carrd.co/ 

https://www.instagram.com/Writingforlight

Alex Foulkes was born in smoky Stoke-on-Trent and grew up in the Staffordshire Moorlands. She has a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing. As a kid, she spent much of her time reading in her school library; as a grown-up, she now loves visiting school libraries and talking about everything books!

Apart from reading and writing stories, Alex’s favourite hobbies include lurking in the shadows, hanging upside-down from ceilings, and hissing at the sun. She still lives in the Moorlands, in a town that seems to be foggy for three-quarters of the year.

Nick Freeman is a writer, critic, and editor who teaches English at Loughbrough University. He's published widely on gothic and supernatural fiction, most recently editing a collection of A.M. Burrage's stories,  The Little Blue Flames and Other Tales of the Uncanny,  for the British Library's 'Tales of the Weird' series in 2022. His ghost stories have been published by a number of small presses and he is currently working on a collection. He lived in a haunted house in  Bath  for some years and lived to tell the tale.

Cathryn Kemp is a Sunday Times bestselling ghostwriter and author, with a prolific career writing celebrity, inspirational, true crime, addiction and nostalgia titles. Her personal memoir Coming Clean won the Big Red Read Prize for Non-Fiction.

A Poisoner’s Tale is her first foray into historical fiction. When not researching dark, dangerous and beguiling women from history, Cathryn can be found on the south coast with her son and her familiar, a ginger cat called Gingey.

Photo credit: Georgina Piper

Julie Malone is the author of two series and several short stories. Her Somerset-based five-volume fantasy adventures, ‘The Winterne Series’, with a linked, fully researched, historical prequel, received media reviews comparing her imaginative writing to J R R Tolkein, Philip Pullman and J K Rowling. The second series comprises six animal stories for younger children. Currently, she working on an undersea-based crime novel due for release in 2025.

Since 2006 Julie has organised book and arts festivals, and founded an annual Nottinghamshire-wide writing competition for children, which ran for 13 years. She works with local community groups, play organisers, gives creative writing workshops in schools, libraries and community groups on various topics, including, of course, Ghost story writing.

To contact Julie, please email her at jaemalone.author@gmail.com, visit her website www.jaemalone.co.uk, or contact her through her Jae Malone Facebook page

Julie is a member of the Society of Authors (SoA) and the National Association of Writers in Education (NAWE) and has a current, Enhanced DBS Certificate.

Alison Moore’s debut novel, The Lighthouse, was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards, winning the McKitterick Prize. Her fifth novel, The Retreat, was published in 2021. She's also published a trilogy for children, beginning with Sunny and the Ghosts. Her short stories have been included in Best British Short Stories and Best British Horror and broadcast on BBC Radio. She's published two collections: The Pre-War House and Other Stories, whose title story won the New Writer Novella Prize, and Eastmouth and Other Stories. She's also the author of five Nightjar Press chapbooks, her latest being The Junction (2024). Her website is www.alison-moore.com.

Photo credit: Beth Walsh Photography

Mark Norman is an author and folklorist based in Devon. He is the curator of The Folklore Library and Archive and the creator and host of The Folklore Podcast, which has been running for 8 years and is ranked in the top 0.5% of podcasts in its genre worldwide, with almost 2 million downloads to date.

Mark's books include the full-length study of ghostly dogs, Black Dog Folklore, Telling the Bees and other Customs, Amazon #1 bestselling Dark Folklore (with his wife Tracey), The Folklore of Devon and The Folklore of Wales: Ghosts (with Dr Delyth Badder). His eagerly-anticipated book Zoinks: The Spooky Folklore of Scooby-Doo will be published later in 2024 with Chinbeard Books. 

Tracey Norman has written fiction for as long as she can remember. She is currently enjoying success with her first stage play WITCH, a historical drama based on original English witch trial transcripts, which premiered in 2016 and has been performed continuously ever since. It has been used as Theatre In Education for Years 8 and 9 and for Exeter University undergrads, and has been included as a formal seminar in two Bristol University undergrad degree courses. Its 75th performance was also its London premiere.

As well as the dramatic and scary, she has also written ‘Sammy’s Saturday Job’, a story about a dragon for young children and ‘The Septillion of Hheserakh’, a collection of fictional creation myths and legends. This is the companion book for one of her current works-in-progress, the first in The Fire-Eyes Chronicles. She and her husband Mark co-wrote Dark Folklore, published in 2021 by The History Press. Her first fantasy novel, Who Is Anna Stenberg? was published in 2023, by Between The Lines Publishing.

Currently, Tracey is working on several projects. A new non-fiction title extends the research she undertook when writing WITCH. She is looking forward to sharing the story of the Lyme Regis housewife whose 1687 trial inspired her, as well as exploring the themes and issues raised in the play. A sequel to Who Is Anna Stenberg? is also in progress.

When she is not writing, Tracey can be found behind a microphone as one of the voices behind Devon-based indie audio production house and theatre company Circle of Spears Productions. She is a freelance narrator on Audible and has a sizeable list of stage, TV and film credits. She gives talks to a variety of groups on historical subjects such as witchcraft and early modern medicine. She doesn’t relax often, but when she does, it generally involves reading, coffee and her obsession with sock yarn. She lives near the edge of a forest in mid Devon with her husband Mark, her daughter, and a feline trip hazard.

Edward Parnell is the author of the Pen Ackerley Prize-nominated Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country (2019), in which he explored the British landscapes that inspired classic authors of supernatural fiction, as well as forming the backdrop to his own haunted story. His first book was the gothic Norfolk-set The Listeners, winner of the 2014 Rethink New Novels prize. His latest is Eerie East Anglia: Fearful Tales of Field and Fen, the most recent addition to the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. He’s recently moved to near Edinburgh, having spent the past two decades living in Norfolk. 

Dr Tim Rideout holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Lincoln. He is interested in the Gothic mode as a political literary form and the way it engages with societal phenomena such as neoliberalism, the climate crisis and the migrant and refugee experience. His book, ‘Gothic Precarity: Fear and Anxiety in Twenty-First-Century’ is due to be published by the University of Wales Press in the summer of 2025. Tim’s love of the Gothic can be attributed to childhood obsessions with Doctor Who and the Fontana Books of Ghost Stories, obsessions that remain in place to this day. 

Susan Stokes-Chapman was born in 1985 and grew up in the historic Georgian city of Lichfield, Staffordshire. She studied for four years at Aberystwyth University, graduating with a BA in Education & English Literature and an MA in Creative Writing. Her debut novel, Pandora, became an instant Sunday Times number-one bestseller. She lives in North Wales.

You can find Susan on Instagram and Twitter (X) under the handle @SStokesChapman. Her website is www.susanstokeschapman.com.

Megan Taylor’s most recent novel is an eerie psychological thriller, The Therapist’s Daughter (Bloodhound Books, 2024) and her four previous novels include a haunted house mystery, We Wait (Eyrie Press, 2019). Her short fiction is collected in The Woman Under the Ground (Weathervane Press, 2014) and further short stories can be found in many places including Weird Horror and Gone: An Anthology of Crime Stories. Her short story, The Grandchildren, was released as a chapbook single from Nightjar Press in 2024. Megan lives in Nottingham, where she's been running creative writing courses and workshops for over ten years. For more information, please visit www.megantaylor.info. 

Angeline Trevena was born and bred in a rural corner of Devon, but now lives among the breweries and canals of central England. She writes dystopian urban fantasy and post-apocalyptic fiction, and is the author of a series of bestselling fantasy worldbuilding guides. Her new lockdown hobby was drawing fantasy maps and, after a few years honing her skills, she now takes on map-drawing commissions and has become a popular cartographer on TikTok.

worldbuilding: stepbystepworldbuilding.com
fiction: angelinetrevena.co.uk

Willow Winsham is an historian and author specialising in folklore and the history of the witch trials.

Her books include: Accused: British Witches Throughout History and England’s Witchcraft Trials, and she is co-author of the Treasury of Folklore series with Dee Dee Chainey. Her next book, The Story of Witches, is due to be published in March 2025. Willow is also co-founder of the #FolkloreThursday, hashtag and website, dedicated to sharing diverse folklore from around the globe. She has contributed articles on a variety of history and folklore based topics to various magazines, and authored the monthly folklore column in The Countryman magazine from 2021-2023.

Willow spends her spare time crocheting, singing, watching Neighbours and Doctor Who, and trawling through parish records in the hope of tracking down elusive genealogical connections. She lives in Derbyshire with her three children and two British Shorthair familiars cats.