Oliver Onions

Born in Bradford, Yorkshire, on November 13, 1873, he began his working life as a commercial artist and illustrator before turning to fiction. That visual background seems to have stayed with him: even in his strangest tales, the settings feel sharply seen and vividly placed.

He wrote across several genres, but readers have especially kept returning to his supernatural fiction. Widdershins and the novella The Beckoning Fair One helped secure his reputation as a master of the ghost story, while The Story of Louie brought him wider notice as a novelist and later formed part of the trilogy collected as Whom God Has Sundered.

He was married to the novelist Berta Ruck, and in 1918 he legally changed his name to George Oliver while continuing to publish as Oliver Onions. He died in Aberystwyth, Wales, on April 9, 1961, leaving behind a body of work admired for both its psychological tension and its quiet, lingering power.