Catherine Spooner

Background

About Catherine Spooner

Catherine Spooner is an academic and creative writer. She is Professor of Literature and Culture at Lancaster University, where she teaches both English Literature and Creative Writing. Her academic research is centred on Gothic in literature, film and popular culture, and fashion and costume in literature and film, within the broader spectrum of literature and culture from the late-eighteenth to the twenty-first century. She has published three academic monographs, four co-edited collections, and has won the Allan Lloyd Smith Prize and the Justin D. Edwards Prize, awarded by the International Gothic Association to work that advances the field of Gothic Studies. Her creative practice encompasses poetry, prose fiction and creative non-fiction with a strong Gothic slant, and she is the recipient of a Northern Writers Arvon Award, the McLellan Poetry Prize, the Magma Poetry Editors' Prize, and was part of the Women's Prize Discoveries cohort 2023. Catherine works frequently with public institutions. She contributed to the volumes accompanying the British Film Institute’s season Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film and the exhibitions Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination at the British Library, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tod und Teufel: Faszination des Horrors at the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf. She has given public talks at venues including the Barbican Gallery, the BFI, the British Library, the Brontë Parsonage Museum, the Design Museum London, the Design Museum Den Bosch, the Freud Museum, ICA London, the National Theatre and the V&A, and has made media appearances on BBC Breakfast, BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 6 Music, BBC World Service, BBC Radio Lancashire, BBC Radio Essex and BBC Three Counties Radio.