Reggie Oliver (writer)

Last updated

Reggie Oliver
Born1952
London, England
Occupation
  • Playwright
  • biographer
  • author

Reggie Oliver (born 1952 in London) is an English playwright, biographer and writer of ghost stories.

Contents

Life and career

Reggie Oliver was educated at Eton (Newcastle Scholar, 1970, Oppidan Scholar) and University College, Oxford (BA Hons 1975), and has been a professional playwright, actor, and theatre director since 1975.

He has worked in radio, television, films, and theatre, both in the West End and outside London. He was a founding member of the late Sir Anthony Quayle's Compass Theatre, and both played the part of Traverse and understudied Sir Anthony in the tour and West End run of The Clandestine Marriage in 1984.

His plays include Imaginary Lines (which was first produced and directed by Alan Ayckbourn at Scarborough in 1985 and has since been translated into several languages), Absolution (King's Head, 1983), Back Payments (King's Head, 1985), Taking Liberties (Wolsey, Ipswich, 1996), Put Some Clothes On, Clarisse! (Duchess Theatre, London, 1989), and Winner Takes All—the last described by Michael Billington as "the funniest evening in London" when it was revived at the Orange Tree Theatre in 2000. [1] His play A Portrait of Two Artists was performed on Radio 3 in 1989.

Oliver's biography of his aunt Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed, was published by Bloomsbury in 1998; and he is a contributor to the historical magazine History Today. He has written about ghost stories for such journals as Supernatural Tales, All Hallows, Wormwood for which he writes the regular Under Review column, and Weirdly Supernatural.

He lives in Suffolk and was married to the artist and actress Joanna Dunham until her death in 2014.

Horror fiction

Oliver's first horror story appeared in the journal Weirdly Supernatural under the Haunted River imprint. This was followed by Oliver's first two collections, The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler, again under the Haunted River imprint. The former was nominated for an International Horror Guild Award and the latter short-listed by the Dracula Society for a Children of the Night award. Both books received favourable notices from reviewers in such small press magazines as Weird Tales and All Hallows.

In All Hallows 34, Jim Rockhill praised Oliver's The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini, noting:

Oliver’s ability to create a sense of time and place in every one of these stories is exemplary.... As a work of spiritual terror it has few peers.... Thomas Ligotti and Matt Cardin are the only authors writing today who equal the assurance demonstrated by the author of this tale in ripping away the veil separating mundane reality from the shrieking abyss it conceals.

Ramsey Campbell has also written positively about the same work: "Oliver’s sharp eye for character and ear for dialogue never desert him.". [2] In his introduction to The Folio Book of Horror Stories he wrote "I believe Reggie Oliver to be the greatest living British classicist in our field who upholds its highest literary qualities." [3]

His experiences in the worlds of academe, the Church of England, and the arts have all provided inspiration for his work. A number of his stories are set within the rather seedy end of show business, drawing on his background as a playwright, director and actor. Douglas Campbell wrote of one such story, "The Skins", "I find it hard to believe that there wasn't some kind of a dare involved when Oliver set out to write a tale about a haunted pantomime horse, but the story itself is an unforgettable piece, drawing to a grotesque and pathetic climax in a horribly plausible world of down-at-heel theatre folk." [4]

He has pastiched a number of styles and authors, from Restoration comedy and 16th-century mystical texts to Oscar Wilde and M. R. James. A story in Arthur Machen's style resulted in his winning the Friends of Arthur Machen short story competition in 2005.

Oliver's work has appeared in over seventy anthologies, including Acquainted with the Night,Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Best New Horror etc. He has acted as consultant on a project which has seen all of M. R. James's ghost stories released on CD.

In April 2010, Centipede Press published Oliver's collected short stories in a volume which features many new illustrations. He frequently illustrates his own work, and very occasionally that of others such as Anna Taborska, Robert Shearman and Susan Hill.

Publications

Plays

Biography

Fiction

For Children

Collected and Selected editions

Plays Performed

Stories in anthologies

Criticism

Awards

Numerous nominations for World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Stoker, International Horror Guild and Shirley Jackson awards

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ramsey Campbell</span> English author (born1946)

Ramsey Campbell is an English horror fiction writer, editor and critic who has been writing for well over fifty years. He is the author of over 30 novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them winners of literary awards. Three of his novels have been adapted into films.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Aickman</span> British writer and conservationist (1914–1981)

Robert Fordyce Aickman was an English writer and conservationist. As a conservationist, he co-founded the Inland Waterways Association, a group which has preserved from destruction and restored England's inland canal system. As a writer, he is best known for his supernatural fiction, which he described as "strange stories".

Laird Samuel Barron is an American author and poet, much of whose work falls within the horror, noir, or horror noir and dark fantasy genres. He has also been the managing editor of the online literary magazine Melic Review. He lives in Upstate New York.

Tartarus Press is an independent book publisher in Coverdale in North Yorkshire, England.

Jessica Amanda Salmonson is an American author and editor of fantasy and horror fiction and poetry. She lives on Puget Sound with her partner, artist and editor Rhonda Boothe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">W. H. Pugmire</span> American horror writer (1951–2019)

Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire, was a writer of weird fiction and horror fiction based in Seattle, Washington. His works typically were published as W. H. Pugmire and his fiction often paid homage to the lore of Lovecraftian horror. Lovecraft scholar and biographer S. T. Joshi described Pugmire as "the prose-poet of the horror/fantasy field; he may be the best prose-poet we have" and as one of the genre's leading Lovecraftian authors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Jones (author)</span> English editor and author

Stephen Jones is an English editor of horror anthologies, and the author of several book-length studies of horror and fantasy films as well as an account of H. P. Lovecraft's early British publications.

Lisa Morton is an American horror author and screenwriter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rick Kennett</span> Australian writer

Rick Kennett is an Australian writer of science fiction, horror and ghost stories. He is the most prolific and widely published genre author in Australia after Paul Collins, Terry Dowling and Greg Egan, with stories in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies in Australia, the US and the UK.

The Australian Shadows Awards, also known as the Australasian Shadows Awards, are annual literary awards established by the Australian Horror Writers Association (AHWA) in 2005 to honour the best published works of horror fiction written or edited by an Australian/New Zealand/Oceania resident in the previous calendar year.

Michael Raymond Donald Ashley is a British bibliographer, author and editor of science fiction, mystery, and fantasy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Glen Hirshberg</span> American author (born 1966)

Glen Martin Hirshberg is an American author best known for horror fiction.

Mark Valentine is an English short story author, editor and essayist on book-collecting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">R. B. Russell</span> British publisher, editor, author, illustrator

Ray B. Russell is an English publisher, editor, author, illustrator, songwriter, and film maker.

Rosalie Parker is an author, scriptwriter and editor who runs the Tartarus Press with R. B. Russell.

John Howard is an English author, born in London in 1961. His fiction has appeared in anthologies, magazines, and the collections The Silver Voices, Written by Daylight, Cities and Thrones and Powers, and Buried Shadows. The majority of Howard's stories have central and eastern European settings; many are set in the fictional Romanian town of Steaua de Munte. The Defeat of Grief is a novella set in Steaua de Munte and the real Black Sea resort of Balcic; the novellas "The Fatal Vision" and The Lustre of Time form part of an ongoing series with Steaua de Munte architect and academic Cristian Luca as protagonist. Numbered as Sand or the Stars attempts a 'secret history' of Hungary between the World Wars.

Exotic Gothic is an anthology series of original short fiction and novel excerpts in the gothic, horror and fantasy genres. A recipient of the World Fantasy Award and Shirley Jackson Awards, it is conceptualized and edited by Danel Olson, a professor of English at Lone Star College in Texas.

Lynda Rucker is an author of horror and fantasy short stories.

Brendan Connell is an American author and translator. Though his work often falls into the horror and fantasy genres, it has also often been called unclassifiable and avant-garde. His style has been compared to that of J.K. Huysmans and Angela Carter. Some of his shorter fiction, such as that contained in his collection Metrophilias, has been referred to as prose poetry.

Ron Weighell was a British writer of fiction in the supernatural, fantasy and horror genre, whose work was published in the U.K., the U.S.A., Canada, Germany, Ireland, Romania, Finland, Belgium and Mexico. His stories were included in over fifty anthologies and published in six volumes containing his own work exclusively. Weighell is listed as an author in the online Bibliothèque Nationale de France, with a selected bibliography. A short biography and limited bibliography are available in the goodreads.com website. A more extensive bibliography of his published work is available in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Weighell died on 24 December 2020, some weeks after suffering a stroke. Obituaries have been published by the Fortean Times magazine, the newsletter of The Sherlock Holmes Society of London, and Locus Magazine.

References

  1. Michael Billington (25 January 2000). "A Farce of Nature". The Guardian. Guardian News and Media Limited. Retrieved 1 May 2010.
  2. Dark Horizons, 2003. British Fantasy Society.
  3. The Folio Book of Horror Stories Introduction p.XVI
  4. Douglas Campbell, rev. of The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler, All Hallows 41 (February 2006), p. 191.