Ramsey Campbell was born in Liverpool in 1946 and now lives in Wallasey. He has received the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild, and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015, he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature. 

His first book was published by the legendary Arkham House when he was 18 years old. His later work draws on the British and American traditions of horror fiction. It ranges from the psychological to the ghostly, the subtly uncanny to the cosmic, the quietly disquieting to the terrifying, the poignant to the darkly comic.