About
Photograph (2022) by Peter Coleborn
Stephen Volk is probably best known as the BAFTA-winning writer of the notorious (some say "legendary") 1992 BBCTV "Halloween hoax" Ghostwatch, starring Michael Parkinson and Sarah Greene, which spooked the nation, hit the headlines, caused questions to be raised in Parliament, and was recently voted one of the top British horror films of all time. He was also creator and lead writer of ITV's award-winning paranormal drama series Afterlife starring Lesley Sharp and Andrew Lincoln. He co-wrote StudioCanal/BBC Films' The Awakening (2011), a period ghosthunter story starring Rebecca Hall, Dominic West and Imelda Staunton, and adapted Phil Rickman's best-selling supernatural/crime novel Midwinter of the Spirit as a 3-part miniseries for ITV starring Anna Maxwell Martin as a C of E exorcist with David Thelfall as her mentor.
His first produced screenplay was Ken Russell's Gothic (1986) -- a trippy telling of the Frankenstein origin story starring Gabriel Byrne as Lord Byron, Julian Sands as Shelley , and Natasha Richardson as Mary. Other feature scripts have included The Guardian (1990) starring Jenny Seagrove, directed and co-written by William Friedkin; Superstition (based on the true story of Carole Compton) starring Mark Strong and Charlotte Rampling; and the vampire-adjacent Octane starring Madeleine Stowe, Norman Reedus and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, as well as screenplays for Goldcrest, MGM United Artists, Sony/Columbia, Paramount, TriStar, and Universal.
For television, as well as the above, he has written standalone dramas under the umbrellas of Channel 4's Shockers and BBC1's supernatural anthology series Ghosts (1995), while in the short film arena he won a British Academy Award (BAFTA) for his short film The Deadness of Dad starring Rhys Ifans, directed by Philippa Collie Cousins, and has garnered a number of awards for the more recent Baby on Board directed by Andrew David Barker, including Best Screenplay at the Lytham International Film Awards.
Over the years his fiction has been selected for Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Best British Mysteries, Best New Horror and Best Horror of the Year -- with two stories appearing in the inaugural edition of Salt's Best British Horror 2014. His first collection of short stories, Dark Corners, was published in 2006, from which his story 31/10 (a sequel to Ghostwatch) was short-listed for both a British Fantasy Award and a Bram Stoker Award. His second collection, Monsters in the Heart won the British Fantasy Award for Best Collection in 2014. The Parts We Play followed in 2016 -- with an accompanying exclusive volume called Supporting Roles, then a fourth collection, Lies of Tenderness in 2022.
His novella Vardøger was short-listed for both a Shirley Jackson Award and a British Fantasy Award, with his story Newspaper Heart winning BFA Best Novella in 2015. However, arguably his most acclaimed fiction to date is the novella Whitstable - featuring the late horror star Peter Cushing, published in 2013 (the actor's centenary year). With the addition of Leytonstone, inspired by the boyhood of Alfred Hitchcock, and Netherwood, featuring the novelist Dennis Wheatley and the occultist Aleister Crowley, Volk completed The Dark Masters Trilogy, published as a complete volume in 2018 by PS Publishing.
Other books include Under a Raven's Wing, The Good Unknown and Other Ghost Stories, and the non-fiction volume Coffinmaker's Blues, published in 2019 by Electric Dreamhouse, a compilation of over sixty articles written for the genre magazine Black Static.
For theatre, his play The Chapel of Unrest premiered exclusively at The Bush, London, in 2013, starring Jim Broadbent and Reece Shearsmith, while for several years he was a co-director of Antidote Theatre, based in Bath, which produced a number of stage plays, including his own Answering Spirits, about the birth of Spiritualism in America, as well as new work by other writers.
He has also acted as a tutor of screenwriting nationally and internationally, notably for the Performing Arts Lab (PAL) in Kent and South Africa, and has held creative writing masterclasses and given illustrated talks at such venues as the Watershed in Bristol, the Edinburgh Science Festival, Alt.Fiction in Derby, FantasyCon, the London Film School, Goldsmith's College, University of Bath, the London Screenwriters Festival, Horror Expo Dublin, and the Narrative Conference at UWE Bristol. He has also been a script reader and consultant for individuals and companies including Tiger Aspect.
Appearances in various documentaries include The 100 Greatest Scary Moments (Channel 4), The Found Footage Phenomenon (2021) dir. Sarah Appleton and Phillip Escott, Ghostwatch: Behind the Curtains dir Richard Lawden, Frankenstein and The Vampyre: A Dark and Stormy Night (BBC), the 2022 Blu-ray release of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and The South Bank Show. He has also written contributions to Gothic: The Dark Art of Film (BFI) and All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror.
Born and raised in Pontypridd, South Wales, he studied Graphic Design at Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry, specialising in Film, and was a winner of the BBC/UNESCO/ICOGRADA/ASIFA International Animated Film Contest for Young People judged by John Halas. Subsequently he earned a postgraduate certificate with distinction in Radio Film and Television Studies at Bristol University's Department of Drama. He then gravitated to advertising, becoming the first copywriter to be employed by Ogilvy Benson and Mather who had not been educated at Oxbridge. Here, at his first job, he inherited Salman's Rushdie's recently-vacated desk, going on at various agencies to win a Silver Lion, IPA Effectiveness in Advertising Award, and two D&AD awards, before becoming a full-time screenwriter in the mid-1980s, when Gothic went into production.
Link to the award-winning TV commercial "Mark" (1979)
He currently lives in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, with his wife, the sculptor Patricia Volk RWA FRSS, a Royal West of England Academician and Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors.
Find out more about Patricia Volk here
(photograph below (2005, on the set of Afterlife): Jonathan Hall/Clerkenwell Films/ITV)
His first produced screenplay was Ken Russell's Gothic (1986) -- a trippy telling of the Frankenstein origin story starring Gabriel Byrne as Lord Byron, Julian Sands as Shelley , and Natasha Richardson as Mary. Other feature scripts have included The Guardian (1990) starring Jenny Seagrove, directed and co-written by William Friedkin; Superstition (based on the true story of Carole Compton) starring Mark Strong and Charlotte Rampling; and the vampire-adjacent Octane starring Madeleine Stowe, Norman Reedus and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, as well as screenplays for Goldcrest, MGM United Artists, Sony/Columbia, Paramount, TriStar, and Universal.
For television, as well as the above, he has written standalone dramas under the umbrellas of Channel 4's Shockers and BBC1's supernatural anthology series Ghosts (1995), while in the short film arena he won a British Academy Award (BAFTA) for his short film The Deadness of Dad starring Rhys Ifans, directed by Philippa Collie Cousins, and has garnered a number of awards for the more recent Baby on Board directed by Andrew David Barker, including Best Screenplay at the Lytham International Film Awards.
Over the years his fiction has been selected for Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Best British Mysteries, Best New Horror and Best Horror of the Year -- with two stories appearing in the inaugural edition of Salt's Best British Horror 2014. His first collection of short stories, Dark Corners, was published in 2006, from which his story 31/10 (a sequel to Ghostwatch) was short-listed for both a British Fantasy Award and a Bram Stoker Award. His second collection, Monsters in the Heart won the British Fantasy Award for Best Collection in 2014. The Parts We Play followed in 2016 -- with an accompanying exclusive volume called Supporting Roles, then a fourth collection, Lies of Tenderness in 2022.
His novella Vardøger was short-listed for both a Shirley Jackson Award and a British Fantasy Award, with his story Newspaper Heart winning BFA Best Novella in 2015. However, arguably his most acclaimed fiction to date is the novella Whitstable - featuring the late horror star Peter Cushing, published in 2013 (the actor's centenary year). With the addition of Leytonstone, inspired by the boyhood of Alfred Hitchcock, and Netherwood, featuring the novelist Dennis Wheatley and the occultist Aleister Crowley, Volk completed The Dark Masters Trilogy, published as a complete volume in 2018 by PS Publishing.
Other books include Under a Raven's Wing, The Good Unknown and Other Ghost Stories, and the non-fiction volume Coffinmaker's Blues, published in 2019 by Electric Dreamhouse, a compilation of over sixty articles written for the genre magazine Black Static.
For theatre, his play The Chapel of Unrest premiered exclusively at The Bush, London, in 2013, starring Jim Broadbent and Reece Shearsmith, while for several years he was a co-director of Antidote Theatre, based in Bath, which produced a number of stage plays, including his own Answering Spirits, about the birth of Spiritualism in America, as well as new work by other writers.
He has also acted as a tutor of screenwriting nationally and internationally, notably for the Performing Arts Lab (PAL) in Kent and South Africa, and has held creative writing masterclasses and given illustrated talks at such venues as the Watershed in Bristol, the Edinburgh Science Festival, Alt.Fiction in Derby, FantasyCon, the London Film School, Goldsmith's College, University of Bath, the London Screenwriters Festival, Horror Expo Dublin, and the Narrative Conference at UWE Bristol. He has also been a script reader and consultant for individuals and companies including Tiger Aspect.
Appearances in various documentaries include The 100 Greatest Scary Moments (Channel 4), The Found Footage Phenomenon (2021) dir. Sarah Appleton and Phillip Escott, Ghostwatch: Behind the Curtains dir Richard Lawden, Frankenstein and The Vampyre: A Dark and Stormy Night (BBC), the 2022 Blu-ray release of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and The South Bank Show. He has also written contributions to Gothic: The Dark Art of Film (BFI) and All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror.
Born and raised in Pontypridd, South Wales, he studied Graphic Design at Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry, specialising in Film, and was a winner of the BBC/UNESCO/ICOGRADA/ASIFA International Animated Film Contest for Young People judged by John Halas. Subsequently he earned a postgraduate certificate with distinction in Radio Film and Television Studies at Bristol University's Department of Drama. He then gravitated to advertising, becoming the first copywriter to be employed by Ogilvy Benson and Mather who had not been educated at Oxbridge. Here, at his first job, he inherited Salman's Rushdie's recently-vacated desk, going on at various agencies to win a Silver Lion, IPA Effectiveness in Advertising Award, and two D&AD awards, before becoming a full-time screenwriter in the mid-1980s, when Gothic went into production.
Link to the award-winning TV commercial "Mark" (1979)
He currently lives in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, with his wife, the sculptor Patricia Volk RWA FRSS, a Royal West of England Academician and Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors.
Find out more about Patricia Volk here
(photograph below (2005, on the set of Afterlife): Jonathan Hall/Clerkenwell Films/ITV)
