Abraham ?Bram? Stoker was born in Dublin in 1847. Often ill during his childhood, he spent much time in bed listening to his mother?s grim stories, sparking his imagination. Stoker wrote several stories based on supernatural horror, such as the compelling The Lair of the White Worm, and the most well-known of all his works, the Gothic masterpiece Dracula.

Dr Catherine Wynne is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Hull. She is author of Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage (Palgrave, 2013) and has edited two volumes of Bram Stoker's theatrical writings, Bram Stoker and the Stage: Reviews, Reminiscences, Essays and Fiction (Pickering and Chatto, 2012). She has also edited Stoker and the Gothic: Formations to Transformations (Palgrave, 2015), a collection of essays on Stoker. In 2012 she organized the Bram Stoker Centenary Conference (Hull and Whitby). She has contributed to documentaries on Stoker for radio and television and has spoken about Stoker at the British Library.