Susan Stokes-Chapman

Susan Elizabeth Stokes-Chapman (born 1985) is a British author of gothic historical fiction, particularly set in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Her debut novel Pandora (2022) became a #1 Sunday Times bestseller upon release. This was followed by The Shadow Key (2024).

Stokes-Chapman grew up in Lichfield, Staffordshire. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Education and English Literature and a Master of Arts (MA) in Creative Writing, both from Aberystwyth University.^[1][2]

Stokes-Chapman first attempted to write a novel titled Infelice about William Hazlitt and Sarah Walker in her 20s.^[3] She spent many years researching Georgian history, which she would make use of in her future writing. She took part in the 2019–2020 Room 204 cohort, a Writing West Midlands development programme, and also worked on their Spark Young Writers initiative.^[4]

In 2020, what would become Stokes-Chapman's debut novel Pandora was shortlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize and longlisted for the Bath Novel Award, through which Stokes-Chapman secured her first book deal. At the start of 2021, Harvill Secker acquired the rights to publish Pandora in January 2022.^[5] The novel reimagines the Greek myth of Pandora's box as a 1799 Georgian London-set mystery, following a young woman named Dora Blake who lives with her uncle in an antique shop and stumbles across a mysterious vase.^[6] Pandora debuted at #1 on the The Sunday Times hardback fiction bestseller list^[7][2][8] and was shortlisted for the 2023 Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award.^[9] It had a U.S. release in January 2023.^[10]

In the interim, Stokes-Chapman contributed a short story titled "Widow's Walk" to the December 2023 Christmas-themed collection The Winter Spirits from Sphere Books alongside Laura Purcell, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Elizabeth Macneal, and Catriona Ward.^[11][12] She would reunite with Sphere for the ghost story collection The Witching Hour, due for release in October 2025.^[13]

As announced in May 2023, Stokes-Chapman's sophomore novel The Shadow Key would be published by Harvill Secker in April 2024.^[14] Set in 1783 and weaving together Welsh folklore and the occult, the darker gothic novel follows London physician Henry Talbot who moves to Penhelyg, a fictional coastal village in northern Wales, upon being hired by Lord Julian Tresilian after the previous physician's death.^[15][16] In November 2023, Harvill Secker picked up Stokes-Chapman's next three books: a short story collection titled The Twelve Days of Christmas and her third and fourth novels The Constellations, set in 1765 Prague, and The Moth Farm, set in her home county in the 19th century.^[17]

• Pandora (2022)
• The Shadow Key (2024)
• The Constellations (2026)
• The Moth Farm (TBA)

• The Twelve Days of Christmas (2025)

• "Widow's Walk" in The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights (2023)
• "A Midnight Visitor" in The Witching Hour (2025)