Nicholas Royle

Nicholas Royle is the author of six short story collections – Mortality, Ornithology, The Dummy, London Gothic, Manchester Uncanny and Paris Fantastique – and seven novels, most recently First Novel. He has edited more than two dozen anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories for Salt, who also published his three non-fiction books, White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector, Shadow Lines: Searching For the Book Beyond the Shelf and Finders, Keepers: The Secret Life of Second-hand Books, variously described as ‘sort-of memoir’, literary criticism, and books-about-books. In 2009 he founded Nightjar Press, which continues to publish original short stories in the form of limited-edition chapbooks. In April 2026, his one-act plays, Simister and L NDON, which he adapted from his own short stories, were produced by Thunk Theatre under the collective title Bags For Life at the White Hotel in Salford. He lives in Manchester and London.