Kristina ‘K.C.’ Adams is the author of 21 novels, 3 books for writers, 1 poetry collection, and too many blog posts to count. She publishes mother/daughter ghost stories as K.C.Adams and has a day job as a content marketer. When she’s not writing, she’s playing with her dog or inflicting cooking experiments on her boyfriend.
Website: www.kristinaadamsauthor.com
Blog: www.writerscookbook.com
David Alnwick is an actor and 'Occult Illusionist,' who has performed sold-out shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and throughout UK theatres for over a decade. A pioneer of immersive narrative magic, Alnwick remains the only illusionist requested to perform for the Recreational Fear Lab in Denmark for study. In addition to his TEDx talk 'Why Magic Should Frighten You,' David frequently gives talks on the intersection between performance magic and its occult history. David also devises his own illusions, many of which are performed by hundreds of magicians all over the world (although he always keeps the best for himself).
Melanie Atkinson is a horror writer living on the south coast. She studied English Literature and Creative Writing at Brunel University and is the author of the novel ‘The Last Night In Amsterdam’ and two short story collections ‘The Woods Are Full of Eels’ and ‘Our Lives Are Full of Spectres’.
Richard Farren Barber was born in Nottingham in July 1970. After studying in London he returned to the East Midlands. He lives with his wife and son and works as a manager for a local university. He’s fairly confident people only read these bios to check if the author is a serial killer. (Spoiler alert: he’s not.)
He has over 80 short stories published, eight novellas: “The Power of Nothing”, “The Sleeping Dead”, “Odette”, “Perfect Darkness, Perfect Silence”, “Closer Still”, “All Hell”, “Twenty Years Dead,” and “One of the Dead.” His two novels are: “The Living and the Lost” and “The Screaming Dead” (Co-authored with Peter Mark May).
If you want to check on his serial killer tendencies, follow him on www.facebook.com/RichardFarrenBarberWrites
His website can be found here www.richardfarrenbarber.co.uk
Jennifer Brough (she/they) is a writer and workshop facilitator based in Nottingham. Her work centres the unwell body, queerness and horror through a surreal lens. She is the founder of resting up collective, an interdisciplinary group of sick creatives.
Jennifer has delivered talks and workshops online and in-person with the remote body, Nottingham Contemporary, ORT Gallery, Glasgow Zine Library, and the International Society for the Study of Surrealism. She has also chaired panels on folk horror and the queer gothic for Waterstones' annual Women in Horror weekend. She loves all things gothic and lives with her girlfriend and their two black cats.
Darrell Buxton is the award-winning editor of 'We Belong Dead' magazine, chief programmer for Manchester's annual Festival of Fantastic Films, and the presenter of the monthly 'Fright Club' horror movie nights at QUAD in Derby. Darrell is an experienced freelance lecturer and celebrity interviewer, and has fronted numerous illustrated talks and presentations at past UK Ghost Story Festivals.
Daniel Carpenter is an author and editor who grew up in Manchester. He writes about cities and the people who get lost in them and his debut collection, Hunting by the River was published in April 2024 by Black Shuck Books. He is the Senior Editor at Titan Books, publishing all your favourite horror authors. He lives in London with his family.
Dan Coxon is a finalist for the World Fantasy Awards (Heartwood: A Mythago Wood Anthology) and has won two British Fantasy Awards (Writing the Uncanny and Writing the Future, both co-edited with Richard V. Hirst). He has been shortlisted for the British Fantasy Awards a total of eight times, and was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Awards. In October 2025 his anthology of haunted house stories, Unquiet Guests, was published by Dead Ink Books. His second short story collection, Come Sing for the Harrowing, will be reissued by CLASH Books in April 2026.
Alex Davis is a lecturer, writer and events organiser based in Derby. He works as the co-ordinator for the UK Ghost Story Festival each year, as well as organising a range of other events including Darkness in the Fields and Edge-Lit. He works as a creative writing lecturer for the University of Derby, as well as in media and journalism for De Montfort University.
Jon Dear is a freelance writer and critic on TV and film. He has written for the BFI, including their celebrated Flipside range, Hammer, 88Films, Radio Times, Horrified Magazine, Curious British Television, Doctor Who Magazine, Best of British and Fortean Times. He also contributed to We Don’t Go Back: A Watcher’s Guide to Folk Horror and Royal Holloway University’s Forgotten Television Drama project. Jon is the co-host of the podcasts BERGCAST: The Nigel Kneale Podcast and Due Signori in Giallo.
His work includes commentaries for the Blu Ray Releases of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954), Quatermass 2 (1957), Object Z (1965), Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968), A Warning to the Curious(1972), The Stone Tape (1972), The Ash Tree (1975) and The Signalman (1976). He has appeared in a number of documentaries and extras on subjects ranging from CM Pennington-Richards to Dennis Potter.
In 2023 Jon produced the 70th anniversary live reading of The Quatermass Experiment at Alexandra Palace, starring Mark Gatiss, Alice Lowe and Kevin McNally. His documentary feature, on the legacy of The Stone Tape was released in 2024.
Jon's first book, No Digging: The Story of the BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas is due in 2026, from Headpress.
Sophie Draper was brought up in Leicester and Scotland. Following an MA in Medieval History at St Andrews University, she qualified as a Chartered Accountant and had a busy career in international finance. For a few years she worked in New York, Europe and the Far East. Then she met her husband and settled in Derby. Three boys followed and she took a career break. Returning to work part-time, she was a non-executive director for the Derbyshire Building Society whilst developing her interest in writing and storytelling.
Sophie trained as a traditional oral storyteller. She now performs stories under the name Sophie Snell - fairy tales, folk tales, myths and legends, and sings a little too. It's a life she adores, entertaining all ages in some amazing venues - typically historic buildings, festival, arts and education settings. In 2013, Sophie was nominated for the British Awards for Storytelling Excellence as Outstanding Female Storyteller. For more about her work storytelling, see her website www.sophiesnell.co.uk.
James Everington mainly writes dark, supernatural fiction, although he occasionally takes a break and writes dark, non-supernatural fiction. His second collection of such tales, Falling Over, is out now from Infinity Plus.
He’s also the author of The Quarantined City, an episodic novel mixing Borgesian strangeness with supernatural horror—“an unsettling voice all of its own” The Guardian—the novellas Paupers’ Graves and The Shelter, and the mini-collection Trying To Be So Quiet & Other Hauntings. Alongside Dan Howarth, he has co-edited the anthologies The Hyde Hotel, Pareidolia (Black Shuck Books) and the BFS Award nominated Imposter Syndrome (Dark Minds Press).
Oh, and he drinks Guinness, if anyone's asking. You can find out what James is currently up to at his Scattershot Writing site.
Tracy Fahey is the Irish author of six books, most recently, the British-Fantasy-nominated They Shut Me Up. She has been awarded the 2025 Rubery International Book Award and the 2024 Paul Cave Prize For Literature. Her next book, Queens of the Crone Age is forthcoming from PS Publishing in 2026. She is currently working on a collection of contemporary ghost stories.
Anthony Kerrigan is an author, vodcast host, paranormal documentary producer, public speaker & psychical researcher for the paranormal team GhostÉire.
He co-wrote The Rising of Haunted Ireland (2016) & Drowned-Out Voices (2022) with his wife and colleague Jennifer Kerrigan,and Sinead Houlihan.
He hosts a vodcast show called the ‘GhostÉire Channel’, presently in its fifth season, where he interviews experts in the paranormal and forteana field. Anthony co-produced ‘Phantasm Collective’, a paranormal documentary series, which is now on PARAFlixx and coming soon to other streaming stations. Anthony also appeared on & contributed to the Discovery Channel show Spooked Ireland (2023).
He has done talks in Ireland & the U.K, notably on Faeries, paranormal investigating culture & Ireland’s Hellfire Clubs. He co-organised the first paranormal convention in Ireland in over a decade, Day of the Unexplained in 2023.
Anthony is also the founding member of GhostÉire, a psychical research organisation that was set-up in 2009, that travel all over Ireland, reaching-out beyond the veil, delving into the minds of numerous Spirit beings, yet managing to maintain rational thinking towards strange phenomena.
Victoria Langford is a PhD researcher at the University of Nottingham. Combining academic enquiry with photography and creative writing, she explores Derbyshire and the Peak District through the lens of the Gothic.
Francesca May grew up in the middle of England where she spent her childhood devouring fantasy books and brewing potions in her back garden. She currently lives in Derby with three black cats and two elderly rescue dogs.
By day she works as a bookseller. By night she accidentally kills every house plant she touches and writes novels about gothic mansions, witchcraft, and queer love.
Francesca’s debut fantasy novel Wild and Wicked Things was published by Orbit in early 2022. Her latest fantasy novel This Vicious Hunger was released in August 2025.
Originally from the Wirral, Will Maclean has been fascinated by ghost stories since he was a child, and has been writing them almost as long as he can remember. He's written for television professionally since 2006, during which time he's worked as scriptwriter for people as varied as Alexander Armstrong, Al Murray and Tracey Ullman.
As well as comedy, he's also written extensively for children's television, where he's been an integral part of writing teams that have picked up two BAFTAs and an International Emmy.
He is the author of acclaimed ghost story The Apparition Phase. He's also the co-author, along with James May, of the bestselling Man Lab Book of Usefulness, to tie in with the 2011 series.
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 most recent novel is The Retreat. She’s published two collections: The Pre-War House and Other Stories, whose title story won the New Writer Novella Prize 2009, and Eastmouth and Other Stories, whose title story appeared in both Best British Short Stories 2015 and Best British Horror 2015. Selected stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio. She’s also the author of an Eden Book Society novella; a trilogy for children, beginning with Sunny and the Ghosts www.sunnyandtheghosts.com; and five Nightjar Press chapbooks, her latest being The Junction, included in Best British Short Stories 2025. www.alison-moore.com
Steve Nallon is a writer and actor who began his performing life with his own comedy act on the Northern Working Men’s Club Circuit in Yorkshire in the 1970s. After gaining a degree in Drama and English at the University of Birmingham, Steve became a founding member of the television series SPITTING IMAGE, where he voiced many of the show’s most iconic characters, including Margaret Thatcher, Alan Bennett and The Queen Mum. As a comedy writer, Steve has a considerable body of credits to his name, including plays and series for BBC radio, three one-man theatre shows, plus the satirical book I, MARGARET, which he co-wrote with Tom Holt. In 2022 THE TIME THAT NEVER WAS, the first in the new young adult adventures series THE SWIDGERS, was published by Luath Press, and the second in the series, THE TIME THEY SAVED TOMORROW, came out in 2024. DESTINATION TIME TRAVEL, an exploration of the story tropes of time travel tales written with British Film Institute archivist Dick Fiddy, was published in 2023, and STEVE NALLON’S GHOST STORIES, a collection of twelve supernatural tales, was released in 2024. Steve is now a much sought after speaker on the lecture circuit and in colleges, where his insightful and amusing talks are enjoyed by those of all ages and background.
Mark Norman is a public folklorist and author based in the South West of the UK. He has published a number of non-fiction titles on folklore and adjacent subjects with publishers in the UK and US, including HarperCollins, The National Trust and The History Press. His books have variously been shortlisted for the British Fantasy Society non-fiction award and requested for judging by The Wolfson History Prize. His 2021 book Dark Folklore, co-authored with his wife Tracey, achieved Amazon #1 Bestseller status, knocking Stephen Fry off the top of the folklore chart. Both he and Tracey were very smug about this!
Outside of writing, Mark is best known as the creator and host of The Folklore Podcast, which has been running for 10 seasons and has had over 2 million downloads, placing it in the top 0.5% of podcasts in its genre globally. Mark founded the charity The Folklore Library and Archive which preserves folklore material in all formats, making it freely available for the public good.
Tracey Norman's stage play WITCH, a historical drama based on original English witch trial transcripts, premiered in 2016, with over 80 performances to date. 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.
Recent publications are ‘Devon’s Forgotten Witches 1860-1910’ (2025), ‘Dark Folklore’ (2021), both co-written with her husband Mark, and ‘Who Is Anna Stenberg?’ (2023), her first full-length novel. Tracey tutors the course Introduction to British Witchcraft for the education website Learn for Pleasure.
Tracey is part of Devon-based indie audio production house/theatre company Circle of Spears Productions. She is a freelance narrator on Audible with a sizeable list of stage, TV and film credits. She gives talks to a variety of groups on historical subjects.
www.traceynormanauthor.com
BlueSky @traceynormanauthor.bsky.social
TC Parker is a writer and researcher based in Leicestershire, where she lives with her partner and family. The author of Tradwife, the El Gardener crime trilogy (The Debt, The Push and The Remembrance) and the horror novels Saltblood, A Press of Feathers, Salvation Spring and Hummingbird, she’s been a copywriter, a lecturer and, very briefly, an academic. Now she runs a semiotics and cultural insight agency by day and dreams up stories at night, when the kids are asleep.
Corinne Pollard is a disabled horror writer and poet from West Yorkshire, UK who has been published in over 30 indie anthologies such as with Black Hare Press, Carnage House Publishing, Inky Bones Press, Graveside Press, Three Cousins Publishing, The Ravens Quoth Press, Raven Tale Publishing, A Coup of Owls Press, and The Stygian Lepus. Corinne writes reviews and the weekly newsletter for The Horror Tree website. Aside from writing, Corinne enjoys metal music, visiting graveyards, and shopping for books. Follow her dark world on: https://linktr.ee/corinnepollard
Emma Probett is a writer, researcher, and podcaster of 19th century British literature and history. Their work focuses on connections that have been overlooked and under-represented. Emma's current projects include: a chapter for a new edited companion to Dracula, an article on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016), a public access walking tour of Victorian Leicester, and a monograph comparing the novels of Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell. Their upcoming research on Dracula's relationship to survival cannibalism will focus on a new landscape, moving away from the sea to look at Dracula's mountain home.
Malcolm Schofield is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Derby and the module leader for Parapsychology, Human Behaviour and Evolution, and Independent Studies in Psychology. Additionally, he's the lead of the B:ICEP (Belief Identity, Cognition, Experience, and Personality) research group. His research interests span paranormal, religious, and conspiracy beliefs and their relationship to personality and cognition. He si interested in music psychology and supervises many PhD, Masters and Undergraduate projects. He has previously edited the Journal of the Society for Psychological Research, sat on the Society for Psychical Research council, and is a member of their Spontaneous Cases Committee. He has been featured on the BBC documentary ‘Paranormal: The Girl, the Ghost and the Gravestone’, and have been in the Times Higher Education, Independent, Daily Mirror and the Daily Star.
Catriona Ward was born in Washington, DC and grew up in the US, Kenya, Madagascar, Yemen, and Morocco. She is the bestselling author of Looking Glass Sound, Sundial and The Last House on Needless Street, which was both a Richard and Judy Book Club and BBC2 Between the Covers Book Club pick. She lives in London and Devon.
Photo © Robert Hollingsworth
Dan Webber (he/him) is an award-winning LGBTQ+ poet, promoter and producer based in Derby. He has appeared at festivals across the country, including Glastonbury Festival, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Wrestival, Timber Festival, Reading Fringe Festival, Y NOT Festival and Wolverhampton Literature Festival. He performed as part of the 25th Birthday Celebrations for Leicester Comedy Festival and was named BBC Local Poet for Derby, for National Poetry Day in 2016. In 2017, Dan made his West End debut headlining Incite at The Phoenix Artist Club.
Collections include ‘Genre Fluid’ (2019), ‘The Derby Witness’ (2022) both published by Big White Shed (held within The National Poetry Library) and ‘Whispers From The Woods’ published by The University of Derby with support from Big White Shed (2025). A stage-show version of Genre Fluid toured between 2019 and 2020 and was named Best Solo Show at Morecambe Digital Fringe in August 2020.
Dan has performed ghost stories at Theatres and Museums across the country, most notably with Don’t Go Into The Cellar Theatre Company and has spent the 9 years scare-acting and storytelling with Fancy Entertainment.
In 2024 Dan was The Dracula Events Specialist for ‘Dracula Returns To Derby’ a yearlong AHRC funded research project exploring the link between Derby and the world’s most famous Vampire, producing and co-producing Dracula themed events at venues across Derby.
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, England’s Witchcraft Trials, The Story of Witches, and she is co-author of the popular Treasury of Folklore series with Dee Dee Chainey. Her next book, Curious Cats and Fantastical Felines: Cats in Foklore, Myth and Legend, is due to be published in April 2026. 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, Traitors, 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.
After eleven years as a criminal barrister, Ally Wilkes decided to become ‘professionally spooky’. Her first novel, All The White Spaces, was a Bram Stoker Award finalist; her second novel, Where The Dead Wait, was one of Esquire’s best horror books of 2023; Ally’s short stories appear every year in numerous online magazines and print anthologies. She’s currently working with CBC on their Writing the Gothic and Supernatural course, teaching a residential writing retreat with Hawkwood, running various online courses (including Writing Historical Horror with Alex Davis), and providing industry-honed feedback to clients of her literary consultancy. Her next novel, Man Eater – set in the fevered jungles of the Amazon during the late Victorian orchid-hunting craze – will be published in February 2027 by Titan (UK) and Simon & Schuster (US).
Susannah Wise grew up in London and the Midlands. She is the author of two previous novels, This Fragile Earth, (Orion/Gollancz 2021) and Okay Then That’s Great (Orion/Gollancz 2022). Both were longlisted for the Mslexia Award.
Susannah studied at the Faber Academy, graduating in September 2018. She has contributed to, and written articles for newspapers as well as being published in flash and as a poet.
She’s currently adapting AJ West’s debut, The Spirit Engineer, for television in association with Canderblinks Film and Northern Ireland Screen. She’s also an established actor of stage and screen. She lives in London with her partner, son, and two wildly fickle cats.
