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John Howard

John Howard was born in London. His books include The Silver Voices, Written by Daylight, Buried Shadows, A Flowering Wound, and The Voice of the Air. With Mark Valentine has written the joint collections Secret Europe, Inner Europe, Powers and Presences, and This World and That Other. His stories have appeared in many anthologies. He has published essays on various aspects of the science fiction and horror fields, including such iconic authors as Fritz Leiber, Arthur Machen, and August Derleth. He has also written about many now lesser-known and unfairly obscure authors and their work.

B. M. Croker

B. M. Croker was born in Co. Roscommon in 1849. She married John Stokes Croker, an officer in the Royal Scots Fusiliers, in 1870, and accompanied him to India, there commencing a long literary career. Authoring some fifty-two books, her novel The Road to Mandalay was filmed in 1926. Mrs. Croker died at a nursing home in London, after a short and sudden illness, on 20 October 1920.

  • More on B. M. Croker can be found in various issues of The Green Book

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was born in Dublin on 28 August 1814. Though he worked as a journalist and owned several newspapers, he is now best remembered for his pioneering tales of the psychological and supernatural such as “Schalken the Painter”, “Sir Dominick’s Bargain”, and “Carmilla”. His notable novels include The House by the Churchyard (1863) and Uncle Silas (1864). Le Fanu’s seminal short story collection In a Glass Darkly was published in late 1872, less than a year before his death on 7 February 1873.

  • More on Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu can be found in various issues of The Green Book

Mark Valentine

Mark Valentine is originally from Northampton but now lives in Yorkshire near the Leeds-Liverpool canal. He likes second-hand bookshops, vegan food, overgrown gardens, stationery shops and village hall flea markets. As well as his fiction, his other books include studies of Arthur Machen and Sarban, and four volumes of essays on book-collecting.

Timothy J. Jarvis

Timothy J. Jarvis is a writer and scholar with an interest in the antic, the weird, the strange. His first novel, The Wanderer, was published by Perfect Edge Books in 2014. His short fiction has appeared in The Flower Book, The Shadow Booth Volume 1, The Scarlet Soul, Murder Ballads, and Uncertainties I, among other places. He also writes criticism and reviews, and is co-editor of Faunus, the journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen.

Ethel Mannin

Ethel Mannin (1900-1984) was a best-selling author born and bred in South London. Her first novel, Martha, was published in 1923, having first been entered in a writing competition. She continued to write at an astonishing pace, producing over fifty novels during her long career, plus multiple volumes of short stories, autobiographies, travel and political writing. Mannin was also a lifelong socialist, feminist, and anti-fascist. She died in Devon at the age of 84.

Mervyn Wall

Mervyn Wall (1908-1997) was born in Dublin. He was educated in both Ireland and Germany, and obtained his B.A. from the National University of Ireland in 1928. After fourteen years in the Civil Service, he joined Radio Éireann as Programme Officer. In 1957 he became Secretary of the Arts Council of Ireland, retiring in 1975. Known during his lifetime as a broadcaster and critic, he is best remembered for his two satirical fantasies set in medieval Ireland, The Unfortunate Fursey (1946) and The Return of Fursey (1948).

  • More on Mervyn Wall can be found in various issues of The Green Book

Katharine Tynan

Katharine Tynan (1859-1931) was born in Dublin and raised at Whitehall, the family home in Clondalkin. Her literary salon there attracted notables such as W. B. Yeats, with whom she formed a lifelong friendship. Tynan became a prolific writer, authoring more than a hundred novels in addition to memoirs and numerous volumes of poetry. Her works deal with feminism, Catholicism, and nationalism—Yeats declared of her early collection Shamrocks (1887) that “in finding her nationality, she has also found herself”.

  • More on Katharine Tynan can be found in various issues of The Green Book

Dorothy Macardle

Dorothy Macardle (1889-1958)—historian, playwright, journalist, and novelist—was born in Dundalk, Co. Louth. She was educated at Alexandra College in Dublin where she later lectured in English literature. She is best remembered for her seminal treatise on Ireland’s struggle for independence, The Irish Republic (1937), but also wrote novels of the uncanny, including Uneasy Freehold/The Uninvited (1941), Fantastic Summer/The Unforeseen (1946), and Dark Enchantment (1953). She died in Drogheda and is buried in St. Fintan’s Cemetery, Sutton.

  • More on Dorothy Macardle can be found in various issues of The Green Book

Conall Cearnach

“Conall Cearnach” (1876-1929)—F. W. O’Connell—was a polyglot and scholar born in Clifden, Co. Galway. After serving as an Anglican priest, he became the first lecturer of Celtic Languages and Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast. Interested in strange literature, O’Connell made the first translation into Irish of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Cas aduain an Dr Jekyll agus Mhr Hyde in 1929. O’Connell died tragically when he was struck by a bus in October of that year.

  • More on Conall Cearnach can be found in various issues of The Green Book
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