Rebecca Stott - Author of Ghostwalk & The Coral Thief

Rebecca Stott comes from a Scottish family of ships chandlers and fishermen and women who lived and worked on the east coast of Scotland and who were members of an austere and separatist Protestant sect which banned everything worldly including televisions, radios, newspapers, unions, holidays, pets, wrist watches, and popular music. Her grandfather moved to Brighton in the 50s and turned the ships chandlers company into a wholesale grocers business, Stott and Sons, which supplied the restaurants and hotels of Brighton from a rambling, dark and dusty warehouse in Hove. He also ran a publishing company that published and distributed religious tracts.

Rebecca was born in Cambridge in 1964 where her father was reading English at Fitzwilliam College and where he also rowed for his college. Her mother’s family were timber merchants from Wiltshire, also members of the religious group. In the 60s the family moved to Brighton when her father joined and ran the family business and where her grandfather and father were senior ‘ministering brothers’ in the sect. After the family left the group in the 70s, Rebecca won a place at Brighton and Hove High School for Girls and then studied English and Art History at York University. At York she completed an MA and PhD whilst raising her son, Jacob, born in 1984. Jacob now works as a shipbroker selling tankers to Greek shipping magnates from an office in Pall Mall, London.

Rebecca is the author of several academic books on Victorian literature and culture, two books of non-fiction, including a biography of Charles Darwin, Darwin and the Barnacle for Faber (2003), and a cultural history of the oyster. She now works for half the year as a Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich and the other half as a freelance writer and broadcaster. She spends several hours on the River Cam every week, rowing strokeside in a crew of eight.

Rebecca’s first novel, Ghostwalk, was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in the UK in 2007, and was the launch novel of the new fiction list of Spiegel and Grau in the US (a new division of Random House) and was, or is being, translated into 12 different languages including Russian, Serbian and Chinese. It was shortlisted for the Jelf First Novel Award, the Society of Authors First Novel Award and long listed for the Impac Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, The Coral Thief, is published in the UK in September and in the US in January and is also to be published in twelve languages.

She lives in Cambridge with her two teenage daughters, Hannah and Kezia, in a house to the north of the city with a long garden and an almost-finished summerhouse. After her much-loved chickens were killed by a fox in a single night, Kezia has now started growing vegetables and Hannah is an actress and a member of Craft Ensemble and the National Youth Theatre. Rebecca is now finishing a non-fiction book about the first evolutionists, the heretics and infidels behind The Coral Thief and writing a third historical novel about London watermen in the 1880s.

Map of Cambridge as it was in the seventeenth century

view larger map