Author Almanac
Writers are often treated as monuments. The Almanac remembers that they were people. Each entry begins with a date, anecdote, or overlooked detail and uses it as a way into a life, a work, or a larger conversation about reading, writing, and what survives.
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07.09 Michelle Paver
Paver is brilliant at creating a sense of place – and then making you slightly afraid of it.
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02.09 JRR Tolkien
Middle-earth is a dark and dangerous place. So why do we all want to live there?
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01.09 WW Jacobs
Tell me about a story I shouldn’t read just before switching off the light. WW Jacobs is responsible for one of mine …
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28.08 J Sheridan Le Fanu
I’ve been in thrall to the vampire for long as I can recall … but not all of them are created equally. Carmilla is a favourite, and should be one of yours, too.
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26.08 John Buchan
Is there anything more unsettling than not knowing what’s real and what isn’t?
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24.08 John Polidori
Aristocratic, urbane, seductive, and at home in respectable society. Oh, and monstrous. Polidori’s contribution to THAT literary house party is too often overlooked.
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20.08 HP Lovecraft
Cthulhu’s done spectacularly well for an entity that seems to sleep like a teenager the day after a house-party. But sometimes the horror is far more personal and intimate … and all the weirder for it.
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13.08 HG Wells
Wells seems repeatedly fascinated by what happens when intelligence outruns sympathy. Are you thinking of AI when you read that?
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09.08 Philip Larkin
I remember the first time I really noticed “spring-woken tree”. Honestly, I just thought: wow. I stopped reading … … and that is the biggest compliment I can pay any author
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08.08 Shirley Jackson
Horror shows us the monster. We react. Terror invites us to imagine it. We anticipate.