Join Sarah Perry as she discusses with Avril Horner the importance of Iris’ use of the gothic, and the impact it had on her own fiction.

Sarah Perry is the internationally best selling author of the novels Melmoth, The Essex Serpent, and After Me Comes the Flood, and the non-fiction Essex Girls. She is a winner of the Waterstone’s Book of the Year Awards and the British Book Awards, and has been nominated for major literary prizes including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Folio Prize and the Costa Novel Award. Her essays have been widely published, and she has contributed to the Guardian, the New York Times, the Observer, and the London Review of Books. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has a PhD in Creative Writing, and has been a UNESCO City of Literature Writer in Residence in Prague, and a Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library and the Savoy Hotel in London. Her second novel, the No. 1 bestseller The Essex Serpent, is currently being adapted for television, starring Claire Danes in the lead role.

Avril Horner is Professor Emeritus at Kingston University and a world-leading expert on Gothic Fiction. She has co-edited collection on Murdoch’s work, as well as ‘Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch’ with Anne Rowe. Her biography of Barbara Comyns is forthcoming.