It gave me focus and meant I was compelled to write each day, to form a habit. And I think that’s really what the UEA course did for me. But I was also a bit lazy and unmotivated, and really needed concrete deadlines and the thought that other people were going to critique it to cajole me along.

It had been in my head for years and was the novel I really wanted to write. When I applied to the course I had written a couple of short fragments of what was to become The Listeners. It was strange really, as at that point I was toying with ideas for another novel and hadn’t set out to write a non-fiction book at all.” You started at UEA in 2006. So Ghostland came out of that, though it became something much more personal that the ideas we first discussed. So of course I went and met him and we discovered we had a shared love of 1970s horror films. A commissioning editor at Harper Collins read it and emailed me to ask if I’d ever thought about writing a book on the subject. James and a visit I took to the place where he grew up, in Suffolk. “Ghostland came about after I wrote a blog post about M. The place was full of odd stories and local village legends – there was said to be a bottomless pit, for instance, called the Devil’s Pit – and these things obviously fed into my childhood imagination and remained with me into adulthood. In that way I suppose I was quite like the protagonist in that novel. I grew up in the barren, treeless Lincolnshire fens, but at my grandmother’s I could go and wander off all day in the woods, surrounded by nature. “The Listeners was borne out of my memories of my grandmother’s house, which was in a tiny village near Swaffham. Since then he’s published two books – a novel, The Listeners, that he started during his time at UEA, and a new work of narrative non-fiction, Ghostland, published this month.Įdward has lived in Norfolk for the past 20 years and starts by explaining how the landscape of his home county has influenced the two books he’s written. 'I never would've written my first book had I not have done the course'Įdward Parnell graduated from the MA in Creative Writing in 2007. School of Education and Lifelong LearningĮdward Parnell, MA in Creative Writing, on his new book and how he’s been influenced by the Norfolk landscape School of Politics, Philosophy and Communication Studies

School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing Interdisciplinary Institute for the Humanities

Ghostland book edward parnell