Robert Fordyce Aickman was born in 1914 in London. He was married to Edith Ray Gregorson from 1941 to 1957. In 1946 the couple, along with Tom and Angela Rolt, set up the Inland Waterways Association to preserve the canals of Britain. It was in 1951 that Aickman, along with Elizabeth Jane Howard, published his first ghost stories entitled We Are the Dark.

Aickman went on to publish eleven more volumes of horror stories as well as two fantasy novels and two volumes of autobiography. He also edited the first eight volumes of The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. He died in February 1981.

Helen Marshall is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of two short story collections and two poetry chapbooks. Her stories and poetry have appeared in magazines and anthologies including Abyss & Apex, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet and Tor.com.

She obtained a PhD from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and then spent two years completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford investigating literature written during the time of the Black Death.

Helen has worked as a managing editor for ChiZine Publications, and was recently hired as a permanent Lecturer in Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. She grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, and now resides in Cambridge.

Nicholas Royle is Professor of English at the University of Sussex, where he established the highly successful MA in Creative and Critical Writing in 2002. He has also had a central role in the shaping of creative writing teaching at Sussex at undergraduate level over the past fifteen years.

Nicholas has published two novels with Myriad; Quilt (2010) and An English Guide to Birdwatching (2017). Nicholas has written numerous other critical books, including the academic best-selling textbook An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Fifth edition, 2016) (with Andrew Bennett).

Loren Rhoads is the author of Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel, Morbid Curiosity Cures and the Blues, and the editor of Death's Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries. She is the monthly cemetery columnist at Gothic Beauty and wrote about cemetery travel for almost five years at Gothic Net.

She has served as a cemetery consultant for Travel & Leisure, The Weather Channel, Mental Floss, Atlas Obscura, the Horror Writers Association, the Death Salon, the Chicago Tribune, and more. Her well-trafficked blog, Cemetery Travel, details her first-hand visits. She lives in San Francisco.

Kim Newman is a well known and respected author and movie critic. He writes regularly for Empire Magazine and contributes to The Guardian, The Times, Time Out and others. He makes frequent appearances on radio and TV. He has won the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy and British Science Fiction Awards and been nominated for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and James Herbert Awards.