Eerie East Anglia:Edward Parnell and Daisy Johnson

A truly harrowing evening with Edward Parnell and Daisy Johnson about the fenland horrors which grace our waters. Prepare to be well and truly chilled!

Edward Parnell

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 works of supernatural fiction and film, 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. 

This new anthology includes a wealth of tales from the past 130 years set in Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Essex by a host of authors including ghost story luminaries M. R. James, Robert Aickman, E. F. Benson and Marjorie Bowen, alongside some bright lights of modern weird writing.

Daisy Johnson

Daisy Johnson was born in 1990. Her unsettling Fenland-set debut short-story collection, Fen, was published in 2016 and in 2018 she became the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize with her first novel Everything Under. She is the winner of the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize, A. M. Heath Prize and Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She currently lives in Oxford by the river; however, part of her childhood was spent in Ely, in a room overlooking the cathedral.

The Hotel, her new collection, is a triumph of contemporary horror – a series of short stories that will haunt you long after you turn the final page. A place of myths, rumours and secrets, The Hotel looms over the dark Fens, tall and grey in its Gothic splendour. Built on cursed land, a history of violent death suffuses its very foundations, yet it has a magnetism that is impossible to ignore…