Ghostland is Parnell’s moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – and what is haunting him. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Graham Swift’s Waterland to the archetypal ‘folk horror’ film The Wicker Man… James, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood to the children’s fantasy novels of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper from W. He explores how these landscapes conjured and shaped a kaleidoscopic spectrum of literature and cinema, from the ghost stories and weird fiction of M. In Ghostland, Parnell goes in search of the ‘sequestered places’ of the British Isles, our lonely moors, our moss-covered cemeteries, our stark shores and our folkloric woodlands. For comfort, he turned to his bookshelves, back to the ghost stories that obsessed him as a boy, and to the writers through the ages who have attempted to confront what comes after death. In his late thirties, Edward Parnell found himself trapped in the recurring nightmare of a family tragedy.

‘An exciting new voice’ Mark Cocker, author of Crow Country ‘A uniquely strange and wonderful work of literature’ Philip Hoare Our graduates have won or been shortlisted for every major United Kingdom literary award.SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN ACKERLEY PRIZE 2020 In 2017 one of our alumni, Kazuo Ishiguro, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and two other graduates – Ian McEwan and Anne Enright – have won the Booker Prize for Fiction (for which our alumni have been shortlisted on fifteen other occasions). Our graduates’ publishing success remains unrivalled. Our drama courses have produced a great number of professional alumni in theatre, film and television, including Matt Smith, Olivia Vinall and BBC Radio 1 Breakfast Show host Greg James. You might find them working in the arts, media, publishing and politics, charities and non-governmental organisations, teaching or the commercial sector. Our graduates have gone on to work in a wide variety of professions, as authors and journalists, and in theatre, television and film.

School of Education and Lifelong Learning School of Politics, Philosophy and Communication Studies School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing Interdisciplinary Institute for the Humanities

Edward parnell ghostland