Mat Osman

Mat Osman is the bassist and founder member of the iconic British rock band Suede. He has also worked as a culture journalist during the noughties, writing about art and travel, as well as a composer for films and TV. 

Mat joins us for his brilliant new novel, The Ghost Theatre, which emerged from his awareness that the Elizabethan world was so close to being magical that it takes very little to erase that boundary and make those possibilities real...

A dazzling punk re-imagining of Elizabethan London through the eyes of a clairvoyant, bird-worshiping protagonist and her unlikely theatre troupe

On a rooftop in Elizabethan London two worlds collide. Shay is a messenger-girl and trainer of hawks who sees the future in the patterns of birds. Nonesuch is the dark star of the city's fabled child theatre, as famous as royalty yet lowly as a beggar.

Together they create The Ghost Theatre: a troupe staging magical plays in London's hidden corners. As their hallucinatory performances incite rebellion among the city's outcasts, the pair's relationship sparks and burns against a backdrop of the plague and a London in flames. Their growing fame sweeps them up into the black web of the Elizabethan court, where Shay and Nonesuch discover that if they fly too high, a fall is sure to come…