M. R. James

Montague Rhodes James was born on 1 August 1862 near Bury St Edmunds, though he spent long periods of his later life in Suffolk, which provided the setting for many of his ghost stories. He studied at Eton and Kings College, Cambridge, where he was eventually elected Fellow, and then made Provost in 1905. In 1918 he became Provost of Eton.

He was a renowed medievalist and biblical scholar, and published works on palaeography, antiquarianism, bibliography and history, guides to Suffolk and Norfolk, as well as editing a collection of ghost stories by Sheridan Le Fanu.

However, he remains best known for his own ghost stories, which were published in several collections including Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), A Thin Ghost and Other Stories (1919), A Warning to the Curious (1925) and a collected edition in 1931. M. R. James never married and died on 12 June 1936.

Jerome K. Jerome

An English writer and humorist, Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927) wrote a range of plays, essays and novels during his lifetime and is best known for the classic comic work Three Men in a Boat

Jenn Ashworth

Jenn Ashworth was born in 1982 in Preston. She studied English at Cambridge and since then has gained an MA from Manchester University, trained as a librarian and run a prison library in Lancashire. She now lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Lancaster.

Her first novel, A Kind of Intimacy, was published in 2009 and won a Betty Trask Award. In 2011 her second, Cold Light, was published by Sceptre and she was chosen by BBC's The Culture Show as one of the twelve Best New British Novelists.

Her most recent novels, The Friday Gospels and Fell, were published to resounding critical acclaim. She has also written a memoir, Notes Made While Falling. She lives in Lancaster with her husband, son and daughter.

Kelly Link

Kelly Link is the author of the collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, and Get in Trouble. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press and currently lives in Massachusetts

Bernard Capes

Bernard Edward Joseph Capes (1854-1918) was a prolific Victorian author who published more than 40 books - romances, ghost stories, poetry and history - and won awards in England and America. He is best remembered as an accomplished writer of horror stories in the vein of M.R. James, and has the distinction of writing the first detective novel commissioned and published by Collins - The Skeleton Key in 1919, whose enormous success (8 different editions in 10 years) paved the way for a century of crime books. It was his only crime book, as Capes died in the influenza epidemic on 2 November 1918 before The Skeleton Key was published. A plaque commemorating his life is in Winchester Cathedral, near where he lived.

Robert Aickman

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.

E. Nesbit

Edith Nesbit was born in 1858. Her father died when she was only three and so her family moved all over England. Poverty was something she had known first hand, both as a child and as a young married woman with small children. Like the Railway Childrens' Mother, she was forced to try and sell her stories and poems to editors.

Her first children's book, The Treasure Seekers, was published in 1899. She also wrote Five Children and It but her most famous story is The Railway Children which was first published in 1905 and it hasn't been out of print since.

Edith Nesbit was a lady ahead of her time - she cut her hair short, which was considered a very bold move in Victorian times, and she was a founding member of a group that worked towards improvements in politics and society called The Fabian Society. She died in 1924.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark, DBE, C.Litt., was born in Edinburgh in 1918 and educated in Scotland.

A poet and novelist, she also wrote children's books, radio plays, a comedy Doctors of Philosophy, (first performed in London in 1962 and published 1963) and biographies of nineteenth-century literary figures, including Mary Shelley and Emily Bronte.

For her long career of literary achievement, which began in 1951, when she won a short-story competition in the Observer, Muriel Spark garnered international praise and many awards, which include the David Cohen Prize for Literature, the Ingersoll T.S. Eliot Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Boccaccio Prize for European Literature, the Gold Pen Award, the first Enlightenment Award and the Italia Prize for dramatic radio. She died in 2006.