Online event speakers

Delilah S. Dawson is the New York Times-bestselling and Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of Guillotine, Bloom, House of Idyll, The Violence, It Will Only Hurt For A Moment, Ride or Die, Mine, Camp Scare, the Blud series, the Hit series, Servants of the Storm, Midnight at the Houdini, several Star Wars books, and the Shadow series, written as Lila Bowen. She once saw The Living Unicorn at the circus as a child and has never recovered.

Find her online at www.delilahsdawson.com and on social media, @delilahsdawson.

Dr Steph Lay is a horror writer and parapsychologist exploring the liminal landscapes of modern Britain through folklore, place and the psychology of haunting. Her ongoing project, Revenants on the Redway, maps the strange and uncanny across the new city of Milton Keynes, collecting local ghost stories and urban legends to reveal what lies beneath the city’s rational design. Her fiction and talks draw on her academic background in the uncanny valley effect and her fascination with folk horror’s entanglement of the modern and the mythic. Steph also collaborates on Into The Fog, a YouTube channel dedicated to true tales of the paranormal, where she works on visual storytelling, research and collecting the stories that viewers share. Through her writing, talks and workshops, she invites audiences to pause at the edges - where the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and something ancient stirs beneath the streetlights.

Amanda Mason was born and brought up in Whitby, North Yorkshire. She studied Theatre at Dartington College of Arts, where she began writing by devising and directing plays. Her short stories have been published in several anthologies, and her short story, Three Times, Lefthandwise, was shortlisted for the V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize in 2021. Her debut novel, The Wayward Girls, a dark and captivating story of sisterhood and family secrets, and The Hiding Place, a haunting novel about mothers and daughters, are both published by Bonnier Zaffre. Her third novel, The Dark, will be published by Manilla Press in September 2026.

Andy McGrath is a paranormal researcher with 25+ years' experience. Andy seamlessly connects modern-day encounters with ancient folklore; painting a picture of ethno-known beasts & unusual phenomena that might exist beyond the edge of scientific discovery & human imagination!

A speaker, television presenter, podcaster, field investigator & author of Beasts of Britain & Beasts of the World; Andy has appeared on TV, radio & podcast shows: Sasquatch Chronicles, Bigfoot & Beyond with Cliff & Bobo, Talk Radio’s, The Unexplained with Howard Hughes, Paranormal Activity with Yvette Fielding & Britain’s largest breakfast television show This Morning. He is a regular contributor to tabloid newspaper The Daily Star & has appeared on the History Channel and Blaze in documentaries, ELUSIVE, Sticks & Stones: UK Bigfoot, Britain’s Big Cat Mystery, Weird Britain & Unexplained Island.

He is also the host of the Beastly Theories Podcast; a self-described low-tech, low-key, low-brow endeavour to discuss the highs and lows of paranormal research and obsession with some of the most renowned researchers in the field; wherein he seeks to avail himself (and you) of the prize of knowledge that lies inside their brawny brains.

Currently, Andy is working on a television and book series under the same name. Volume 1 of this new book series – Beastly Theories: 101 Crazy Cryptids! is the first in a diverse paranormal series that seeks to investigate the histories, evidence, and common theories surrounding the numerous weird, wild, & wonderful marvels that have been reported around the globe!

A. C. Wise is the author of Wendy, Darling, Hooked, Out of the Drowning Deep, and Ballad of the Bone Road, along with the short story collection, The Ghost Sequences. Her work has won the Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, and has been a finalist for the Nebula, Bram Stoker®, World Fantasy, Locus, British Fantasy, Aurora, Lambda Literary, and Ignyte Awards. In addition to her fiction, she contributes a review column to Apex Magazine.