Edward Parnell’s first work of narrative non-fiction, Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country (William Collins, 2019), is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as his own haunted past. It is a unique and elegiac meditation on grief, memory and longing, and of the redemptive power of stories and nature –and was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize, awarded to a literary autobiography of excellence.
He has edited All the Fear of the Fair: Uncanny Tales of Circus and Sideshow (2025) and Eerie East Anglia: Fearful Tales of Field and Fen (2024) for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. He has written a new introduction to Ithell Colquhoun’s classic 1957 Cornish travelogue The Living Stones (Pushkin Press, 2025) and contributed a chapter to Translating John Crome: Through Sight to Insight (2025). His first book, The Listeners (2014), a gothic tale of family secrets set at the start of WWII, won the Rethink New Novels Prize.
Having spent the previous two decades in Norfolk, since 2024 Edward has lived on the coast near Edinburgh, where he spends much of his free time birdwatching. He teaches creative non-fiction for the National Centre for Writing and has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia.