Rebecca Stott

Rebecca Stott (born 1964) is a British academic, broadcaster, novelist and a professor at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of two historical thrillers, Ghostwalk (2007) and The Coral Thief (2009), a biography of Charles Darwin called Darwin and the Barnacle (2003) and 2,200-year history of Darwin's predecessors called Darwin's Ghosts. Stott lives and works in London and Norwich. She has three children. She has begun a third novel set in contemporary London.

Stott was born at Cambridge in 1964. She was born into a community of fundamentalist Christians known as the Exclusive Brethren. The Exclusive Brethren are a small branch of the Plymouth Brethren and, unlike their larger counterpart the "Open Brethren" they practice - and enforce - separatism. Stott's family left the sect in the 1970s.

Stott studied English and Art History at the University of York, then got Master of Arts and a Ph.D also at York. She taught at the University of York, the University of Leeds, then Anglia Ruskin University at Cambridge before being appointed to a chair at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. She is also an affiliated scholar at the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.

Stott's debut novel, Ghostwalk (2007) was shortlisted for the Jelf First Novel Award and the Society of Authors First Novel Award. Lydia Brooke is called upon to be the ghostwriter of a book on Sir Isaac Newton's alchemy. Brooke comes to suspect that the death of the book's author, Cambridge historian Elizabeth Vogelsang, may somehow relate to a series of unsolved seventeenth-century murders. The novel, an innovative mix of fiction and non-fiction, blends seventeenth-century accounts of plague, glassmaking, alchemy and theories of optics with a contemporary plot involving quantum physics and animal rights campaigns. The New York Times reviewer called it "Mesmerizing . . . Ghostwalk has an all-too-rare scholarly authority and imaginative sparkle' and compared it to the works of Borges and Edgar Allan Poe. The Independent in 2012 chose it as one of ten best ghost novels.

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