Rebecca Stott
Non-fiction writer, Radio/tv/screenwriter
About
Rebecca Stott is a historian, writer and radio broadcaster, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Emeritus Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at UEA. She taught literature and creative writing full time in universities for thirty-two years, including fourteen years teaching on the world-famous UEA creative writing programme. She has published fifteen books. If she has done well despite challenges in her early life, she believes it is because she has kept focused on her passions, drive and curiosity. The stories and histories she unearths send her in search of a wide range of material including for instance from art history, history of science, archaeology, even marine biology. She loves libraries.
After first publishing academic books, Rebecca began writing nonfiction books for a wider audience such as Darwin and the Barnacle and Darwin’s Ghosts. Her first novel, Ghostwalk, became a New York Times bestseller. The Coral Thief (2012) was a BBC Book at Bedtime. Her most recent novel Dark Earth (2022) was set in the ruined city of Londinium in the sixth century. Her memoir In the Days of Rain: A Daughter, A Father, A Cult won the Costa Biography Prize in 2017.
In 2021 she gave up her academic career to go full time as a novelist and screenwriter, to move south to renovate a house in Lewes, be closer to her grown children and to look after her mother who has Alzheimers. She loves finding ways to help others write with more pleasure, skill and confidence.