Something of a perennial late-starter there were a few detours before I was bitten by the vampire and become an author and writer. I graduated from Art School in the early 1980s and started a furniture business exhibiting in Milan, Cologne and NewYork, selling hand made designs through Harrod’s of London. From there I moved into fabric creations, being helicoptered to remote castles in Scotland to tent four-poster beds and making quilts for royalty. However, I returned to education in the early 2000s and studied Art & Philosophy at Birkbeck University and Cultural Memory at the University of London where I completed my thesis on the vampire film as a site of cultural memory. I continued my research in London but it was not long before I met my soulmate and future wife at a conference on ‘Evil Women’ in Prague and moved to Poznań in Poland where we live with our two children. Once there I have been able to focus more fully on all things monstrous and vampiric and have written many journal articles, and chapters as well as editing and writing books.I focus on monsters in general and vampires in particular exploring their possible meanings within contemporary society, in terms of gender, ethnicity and identity politics. To this end I have edited various Companions that examine this in terms of The Gothic (2018), Horror (2019), Monsters (2020), Toxic Cultures (2021), and The Undead in the 21st Century (forthcoming). Alongside this I am writing an extended series of books on Vampires in popular culture with three published so far and the next due out in early 2021.Read more about this authorRead less about this author