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.
Boy in Darkness is a novella by English writer Mervyn Peake. It was first published in 1956 by Eyre & Spottiswoode as part of the anthology Sometime, Never: Three Tales of Imagination. A "corrupt" version of Boy in Darkness was published both in an anthology, The Inner Landscape, and separately in 1976 with an introduction by Peake's widow, Maeve Gilmore. Referring to the corrupt text, she wrote that "although the Boy in Boy in Darkness is assuredly Titus Groan, [Peake] did not call him so by name"; however, adding the name Titus was one of the specific changes that Peake made between writing and publishing his novella. The correct text has recently become available again in an anthology entitled Boy in Darkness and Other Stories, with a foreword by Joanne Harris and a preface by Peake's son Sebastian, as well as Maeve Gilmore's uncorrected introduction from 1976.
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.
Barquentine is a fictional character in Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series. He is the son of Sourdust, the Master of Ritual of Gormenghast Castle. He is a one-legged, hunchbacked dwarf with a bitter, vicious personality; he never washes, he dresses in filthy rags, and his hair and beard are long, tangled and dirty. He is frequently taunted by the castle's children, who sing "Rotten leg, rotten spine – ya! ya! Barquentine!"
Mr Pye is a 1953 novel by English novelist Mervyn Peake, first published by Heinemann.
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.
"The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb" is a narrative poem written by Mervyn Peake in 1947, and published with his felt-pen illustrations in 1962.
Erasmus Darwin Barlow, FRCPsych, FZS was a British psychiatrist, physiologist and businessman.
Colin Nicholas Manlove was a literary critic with a particular interest in fantasy. Modern Fantasy: Five Studies, which considers at length works by Charles Kingsley, George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Mervyn Peake, was written at a time when "no serious study of the subject [of fantasy literature] has appeared". In it he posits a definition of fantasy as:
A fiction evoking wonder and containing a substantial and irreducible element of supernatural or impossible worlds, beings or objects with which the mortal characters in the story or the readers become on at least partly familiar terms.
Gavin L. O'Keefe is an Australian-born book illustrator and designer. He resided in the USA for a number of years, returning to live in Australia in 2018. O'Keefe has been the dustjacket designer and illustrator for US publisher Ramble House for close to two decades. He is also one of the publisher's commissioning editors.
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.
Mervyn is a masculine given name and occasionally a surname which is of Old Welsh origin, with elements mer, probably meaning "marrow", and myn, meaning "eminent".
Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor is a darkly humorous children's picture book written and illustrated by the British author Mervyn Peake and published by Country Life in 1939. It was his first published work.
Maeve Patricia Mary Theresa Gilmore was a British painter, sculptor and writer, and the wife of author Mervyn Peake.
Gormenghast is an opera in three acts composed by Irmin Schmidt to an English-language libretto by Duncan Fallowell, based on Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy. It premiered at the Opernhaus Wuppertal on 15 November 1998.
NOW was a British political and literary periodical founded in 1940 by George Woodcock, its first editor, from 1940 to 1941, and by Freedom Press from 1943 to 1947.
Viktor Wynd is a British artist, author, and curator, known for his collections of curiosities.
