About
Rebecca Stott was born in Cambridge in the UK in 1964, one of five children, and raised in Brighton on the south coast in a secretive, closed Christian community called the Exclusive Brethren. The group now call themselves the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church. Her father and grandfather were leading ministering brothers in the cult. Members were allowed only very limited contact with the outside world which they were told was run by Satan. The Stott family, who had been members of the cult for many generations, left in 1972 to live in the outside world for the first time, two years after a sexual scandal involving the leader, known as the ‘Man of God’, split the group. Rebecca's memoir about her family history in the cult, In the Days of Rain: A Daughter, A Father, A Cult, was published in 2017. It won the Costa Biography Prize the same year.
After her family left the Exclusive Brethren, Rebecca won a scholarship to Brighton and Hove High School. She went on to York University where she completed a BA, MA and PhD in literature. From 1999 she taught literature and creative writing courses at the universities of York, Leeds and Anglia Ruskin (Cambridge). In 2007 she was appointed Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia where she taught courses on feminist writing, gothic fiction, and workshops and historical fiction classes on the esteemed UEA Creative Writing programme for fourteen years. In 2020 she began writing for BBC Radio Four’s A Point of View. In 2021 she gave up teaching to spend more time on writing and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in the same year. She lives in Lewes. She has three grown-up children, one of whom is the actress Hannah Morrish.
Rebecca Stott has written fourteen books, first works of literary criticism, then, since 2003, books of fiction and creative nonfiction, several of which have been translated into many languages, including Hebrew, Russian, Polish, French, Turkish and Mandarin. Her non-fiction books include Darwin and the Barnacle (Faber, 2003), Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists (Bloomsbury, 2012) and Oyster (Reakton's Animal series, 2003). Her first novel, the historical thriller Ghostwalk (2007), was a New York Times bestseller, translated into fourteen languages and shortlisted for several prizes including the Society of Authors’ First Novel Award. Her second novel, the historical novel The Coral Thief (2012) was a BBC Book at Bedtime. Her memoir, In the Days of Rain (2017), her family story about living inside and then leaving a cult, won the Costa Biography Prize in 2017. Her most recent book, the novel Dark Earth, set in the sixth century, was published in the UK with Fourth Estate and in the US with Penguin Random House in the summer of 2022.