Dr Stephen Carver

Stephen Carver is a writer, editor and literary historian. For 16 years, he taught literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia, where he also took his doctorate, spending three years in Japan as Professor of English at the University of Fukui between 2002 and 2005. He left UEA in 2012 to become Head of Online Courses at the Unthank School of Writing, and to work with The Literary Consultancy in London. He has now retired from teaching to write full-time, although he continues to be affiliated with TLC. Stephen is the biographer of the Victorian novelist W.H. Ainsworth, and he has published extensively on literature, film and history. His short stories have appeared in Not-Not, Cascando, Birdsuit, and Veto, and he is the co-editor (with Ashley Stokes) of the first Unveiled Anthology of New Writing, and the author of the online serial Shark Alley. His literary history The 19th Century Underworld was published in 2018, and this was followed by a second book on Ainsworth, The Author Who Outsold Dickens, in 2020 (both published by Pen & Sword). Stephen was the judge of the Past Search Prize for Nonfiction (2020) and the 2021 Olga Sinclair Short Story Competition. In February 2022, he received the Arthur Conan Doyle Society Award for Scholarly Excellence. He is a reader for a number of academic publishers and journals, a regular contributor to the Wordsworth Editions Blog, and has acted as a historical adviser for BBC Radio 4 and Channel 5. He is currently writing The Opium Eaters for Morton Books, Biker Movies for Pen & Sword, and editing a collection Arthur Machen's fiction for Wordsworth Editions. Steve is married with two cats and a kid; he likes old motorcycles, wild rockabilly and anything to do with horror.