Laura Purcell

Laura Purcell is a British novelist specialising in historical fiction and Gothic horror. A former bookseller, she lives in Colchester and has built a reputation for placing supernatural menace, crime and psychological disturbance within carefully realised historical settings. Her novels have received several genre awards: The Silent Companions won the WHSmith Thumping Good Read Award in 2018, The Shape of Darkness won the Fingerprint Award for Historical Crime Book of the Year in 2022, and The Whispering Muse received the Dracula Society’s Children of the Night Award in 2023. She has also written short fiction for collections including The Haunting Season and The Winter Spirits, as well as the historical-horror podcast Roanoke Falls, set around the lost Roanoke colony of 1587.

Purcell’s earliest historical novels deal directly with the Georgian royal court. Mistress of the Court follows Henrietta Howard and Caroline of Ansbach during the Hanoverian succession and the turbulent family politics surrounding the future George II, while Queen of Bedlam centres on Queen Charlotte and her daughters during George III’s mental illness in the late eighteenth century. She later moved towards historical Gothic fiction: The Silent Companions combines a Victorian story with secrets reaching back two centuries; The Corset centres on a Victorian murderess and prison visitor; Bone China uses a remote Cornish house and nineteenth-century medical experimentation; The Shape of Darkness follows a silhouette artist and child medium in Victorian Bath; and The Whispering Muse is set in the world of a nineteenth-century London theatre. Her House of Splinters returns to the house and sinister wooden figures introduced in The Silent Companions.