Mark Valentine

Mark Valentine is an author, editor, poet and micro-publisher. His short story collections include Selected Stories (2012) and Seventeen Stories (2013), both published by The Swan River Press, Dublin. His story ‘Vain Shadows Flee’ was chosen for Best British Short Stories 2016 edited by Nicholas Royle (Salt Publishing).

Secret Europe is a shared collection with John Howard (author) comprising 25 short stories set in a variety of real and fictional European locations. The Collected Connoisseur (Tartarus Press, 2010) brings together the adventures of an occult detective whose real name is never revealed, some written jointly with John Howard. ‘The Descent of the Fire’, a story in this series by Valentine & Howard, was included in the 2004 World Fantasy Award winning anthology Strange Tales edited by Rosalie Parker.Herald of the Hidden (Tartarus Press, 2013) collects stories about Ralph Tyler, a Northamptonshire psychic sleuth.

As a biographer, Valentine has published a life of Arthur Machen and a study of Sarban.And I'd Be the King of China is a monograph on the author and adventurer Charles Welsh Mason, reprinted in Haunted By Books (2015), a collection of essays about book collecting, minor writers and the uncanny. He wrote regularly about neglected authors for Book and Magazine Collector magazine from 1995 until its closure in 2010. He has also compiled a checklist of 'The Literature of Terrestrial Zodiacs'.

From 1985 to 1988, he edited Source, a journal devoted to the research and preservation of ancient holy wells. He then co-edited (with Roger Dobson) Aklo, a journal of the fantastic. Valentine currently edits Wormwood, a journal dedicated to fantastic, supernatural and decadent literature. Valentine has provided introductions to over thirty books, including titles from Tartarus Press, Valancourt Books and Wordsworth Editions.

In micro-publishing, with Roger Dobson he ran Caermaen Books, principally devoted to titles about Arthur Machen and, with Jo Valentine, he has issued handmade artist books under the Valentine & Valentine imprint. These have include The Third Alias – A T E Lawrence Mystery, which discusses the possibility of a missing book in Lawrence’s bibliography, and The Ephemeral is the Eternal: Three Art Poems by Sidney Hunt, introduced by Valentine, about ‘Britain’s lost art deco experimental poet’.

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