Mervyn Laurence Peake was an English writer, artist, poet, and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books. The four works were part of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, the completion of which was prevented by his death. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J. R. R. Tolkien, but Peake's surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology.
Gormenghast is a fantasy series by British author Mervyn Peake, about the inhabitants of Castle Gormenghast, a sprawling, decaying, Gothic structure. Originally conceived as a single on-going novel, the series was ended by Peake's death and comprises three novels: Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950) and Titus Alone (1959); and a novella, Boy in Darkness (1956), whose canonical status is debated. Peake was writing a fourth novel, Titus Awakes, at the time of his death in 1968. The book was completed by Peake's widow Maeve Gilmore in the 1970s, but was not published until 2011 after it was discovered by their family.
Brian David Sibley is an English writer. He is author of over 100 hours of radio drama and has written and presented hundreds of radio documentaries, features and weekly programmes. He is widely known as the author of many film "making of" books, including those for the Harry Potter series and The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies.
Steerpike is a fictional character in Mervyn Peake's novels Titus Groan and Gormenghast.
Irmin Schmidt is a German keyboardist and composer, best known as a founding member of the band Can.
Gormenghast is a fantasy novel by British writer Mervyn Peake, the second in his Gormenghast series. It is the story of Titus Groan, 77th Earl of Groan and Lord of Gormenghast Castle, from age 7 to 17. As the story opens, Titus dreads the pre-ordained life of ritual that stretches before him. To Titus, Master of Ritual Barquentine and his apprentice Steerpike are the embodiment of all he wants to rebel against. An important sub-plot involves Titus at school, where he encounters the professors, especially Bellgrove, who becomes Headmaster of Gormenghast school.
Titus Alone is a novel written by Mervyn Peake and first published in 1959. It is the third work in the Gormenghast trilogy. The other works are Titus Groan, and Gormenghast. With the trilogy, a fourth work, the novella Boy in Darkness, and a fifth, the fragment Titus Awakes, are often considered part of a larger "Gormenghast series". It was re-edited by Langdon Jones in 1970 using the original manuscript.
Titus Awakes is the editorial title applied to a novel being planned by Mervyn Peake at the time he became too ill to write, about 1960. It was to have been the fourth novel in the Gormenghast series, after Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone. Titus Awakes remains unfinished, as the author succumbed to illness in 1968 before the work could be completed.
Titus Crow is the main character in the eponymous series of horror fiction books by Brian Lumley. The books are based on H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.
Titus Groan is a novel by Mervyn Peake, first published in 1946. It is the first novel in the Gormenghast series.
The Ballantine Adult Fantasy series was an imprint of American publisher Ballantine Books. Launched in 1969, the series reissued a number of works of fantasy literature which were out of print or dispersed in back issues of pulp magazines, in cheap paperback form—including works by authors such as James Branch Cabell, Lord Dunsany, Ernest Bramah, Hope Mirrlees, and William Morris. The series lasted until 1974.
Toby Lawrence Whithouse is an English actor, screenwriter and playwright. His highest-profile work has been the creation of the BBC Three supernatural television series Being Human. He also created the Channel 4 television comedy-drama series No Angels, the BBC America/BBC Two espionage drama series The Game and has written seven episodes for BBC One's Doctor Who. His work on Doctor Who was primarily for the Doctors played by Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi.
Lungbarrow is an original novel written by Marc Platt and based on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. Published in Virgin Books' New Adventures range, it was the last of that range to feature the Seventh Doctor.
"Envoy Extraordinary" is a 1956 novella by British writer William Golding, first published by Eyre & Spottiswoode as one third of the collection Sometime, Never, alongside "Consider Her Ways" by John Wyndham and "Boy in Darkness" by Mervyn Peake. It was later published in 1971 as the second of three novellas in Golding's collection The Scorpion God.
Luke Antony Newman Treadaway is a British actor and singer. He won an Olivier Award for Best Leading Actor for his performance as Christopher in the National Theatre's production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in 2013. He has also been nominated for an Evening Standard Theatre Award.
The Blue Elephant Theatre is a 50-seat fringe theatre situated in the borough of Southwark in London. It was established in 1999 by Antonio Ribeiro.
The Cave is a play written by English novelist and artist Mervyn Peake in the mid-1950s. The play is a three-act drama, which takes place in one cave over three time periods; from the Neolithic period, through medieval to modern day or "the very near future".
Maeve Patricia Mary Theresa Gilmore was a British painter, sculptor and writer, and the wife of author Mervyn Peake.
Nebula Award Stories 4 is an anthology of award-winning science fiction short works edited by Poul Anderson. It was first published in the United Kingdom in hardcover by Gollancz in November 1969. The first American edition was published by Doubleday in December of the same year. Paperback editions followed from Pocket Books in the U.S. in January 1971, and Panther in the U.K. in December 1971. The American editions bore the variant title Nebula Award Stories Four.
Eddie Peake is a British artist. His work includes performance, video, photography, painting, sculpture and installation. His art focuses on "implicit drama within relationships between people", and "how things like desire, sexuality and depression impact on them".
