
John Linwood Grant
is a writer/editor from Yorkshire, UK, who decided to start doing This Thing at the age of fifty-eight. He has had more than ninety stories published in magazines and major anthologies, plus a novel and several novellas. He writes contemporary weird fiction and period strangeness, but occasionally wanders off into classic detective pastiches for fun. And queer fiction. And stories about slightly psychotic ponies or accident-prone half-elves.
His serious weird fiction has been widely acclaimed. His story ‘The Jessamine Touch’ was in the Lambda award-winning anthology His Seed, and another anthology in which his work appears, The Twisted Book of Shadows, was a Shirley Jackson Award winner for 2019. His novel The Assassin’s Coin features the popular Edwardian assassin Mr Dry, from A Persistence of Geraniums, and the related novel 13 Miller’s Court (with Alan M Clark) won the 2019 Ripperology Books award.
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A Shirley Jackson Award finalist for his third collection, Where All is Night, and Starless (Trepidatio), his fourth collection of weird fiction, Ain’t No Witch (Mocha Memoirs Press), concerning 1920s hoodoo and the struggles of Black Americans, came out in May 2024, closely followed by his fifth collection, An Unkindness of Shadows (Lethe Press), the strange encounters of an urbane gay art critic in 1970s Britain.
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Linwood Grant also edits dark fiction anthologies, such as The Book of Carnacki, Sherlock Holmes & The Occult Detectives v.1-4, Hell’s Empire, and two forthcoming weird fiction anthologies for Belanger Books, as well as co-founding and editing Occult Detective Magazine, now in its seventh year. He has his own beard, dogs, and possibly a family. He is active on Facebook, and at his eclectic website:
Illustration by Marni Scofidio