Dr Stephen Carver

Stephen Carver is an author, editor and literary historian. He is currently General Editor of the Wordsworth Editions 'Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural' series. For 16 years, he taught literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia, spending three years in Japan as Professor of English at the University of Fukui. He left UEA to work with The Literary Consultancy. He has now retired from teaching, 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 author of the historical novel 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 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 Blog, and has acted as a historical adviser for BBC Radio 4 and Channel 5. He is currently finessing Hell on Wheels: A History of Biker Movies for White Owl (forthcoming 2026), and has just finished editing horror collections by Arthur Machen, E. Nesbit, and Algernon Blackwood, and an anthology of Irish Ghost Stories for Wordsworth. He is currently working on a collection of First World War Poetry. Steve is married with two cats and a kid; he likes old motorcycles, wild rockabilly and anything to do with horror.