Gothic Fiction with CJ Cooke & Natasha Pulley, Guest Andrew Michael Hurley

Date/Time
Date(s) - Mon 24th Oct - Sat 29th Oct, 2022
All Day

Writing Fiction that Sends a Shiver up your Spine

Want to write fiction that sends shivers up the spine? How about mastering the important art of suspension of disbelief? Join award-winning gothic novelists CJ Cooke and Natasha Pulley as they support you in developing atmosphere, setting, and methods of creating tension in your writing. CJ and Natasha will also help you explore narrative voice and character development, and there will also be useful tips on editing your work, creating a compelling story structure, and making space for the reader. Whatever stage you are at with your writing, CJ and Natasha will help you take your gothic fiction to the next level.

CJ Cooke wrote her first book aged seven. A few decades later, her work is published in 23 languages, has won numerous awards, and has been optioned for film and television. Her works include The Boy Who Could See Demons (2012), about a psychiatrist and her 10-year-old charge in post-Troubles Belfast, which was critically appraised by The New York Times, The Guardian, Booklist, Publisher’s Weekly, and The New York Review of Books, and I Know My Name, which was a No. 1 iBooks bestseller and optioned for TV. Her 2021 novel, The Lighthouse Witches, was nominated for an Edgar Award and an ITW Thriller Award, and is an international bestseller. It is soon to be a major TV series produced by StudioCanal and The Picture Company.   

Natasha Pulley published her first book, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, in 2015. It was an international bestseller and won a Betty Trask Award. Her second, The Bedlam Stacks, was long-listed for the Walter Scott Prize. In June, she’ll be departing from her normal nineteenth century settings to explore an irradiated landscape in 1960s Russia for The Half Life of Valery K. She studied at Oxford and Tokyo, and tries to do what her mum calls Method Research — going to wherever she’s writing about — which is why she spent several weeks at sea on tall ships in order to write about the Napoleonic wars. She will absolutely not be doing that again. 

Andrew Michael Hurley is currently based in Lancashire. His first novel, The Loney, was originally published by Tartarus Press as a 300-copy limited-edition, before being republished by John Murray. It went on to sell in twenty languages, win the Costa Best First Novel Award and Book of the Year at the British Book Industry Awards. Devil’s Day, his second novel, was picked as a Book of the Year in five newspapers and won the Encore Award. Starve Acre was published by John Murray in 2019, with a film adaptation starring Morfydd Clark and Matt Smith in production. Andrew also wrote a short story for The Haunting Season, a best-selling anthology of ghostly and gothic tales published by Sphere in 2020. 

The full fee for this course is £650. This includes your accommodation in a single room with shared bathroom, all meals, hot drinks and snacks from Monday afternoon until Saturday morning, and your tuition. A limited number of en-suite rooms are available for a £50 surcharge. For more information about the practicalities of our courses and retreats, please visit our About the Courses page.

Please let us know if you have any access requirements, for example a ground floor bedroom and / or access to a wheelchair-accessible shower room. For more information about access to our courses, please visit our Access page.

Bookings