Edward Carey
Agent: Isobel Dixon
Assistant: Sian Ellis-Martin
Biography: Edward Carey is a writer and illustrator who was born in North Walsham, Norfolk, England, during an April snowstorm. Like his father and his grandfather, both officers in the Royal Navy, he attended Pangbourne Nautical College, where the closest he came to following his family calling was playing Captain Andy in the school’s production of Showboat. Afterwards he joined the National Youth Theatre and studied drama at Hull University. He has written plays for the National Theatre of Romania and the Vilnius Small State Theatre, Lithuania. In England his plays and adaptations have been performed at the Young Vic Studio, the Battersea Arts Centre, and the Royal Opera House Studio. He has collaborated on a shadow puppet production of Macbeth in Malaysia, and with the Faulty Optic Theatre of Puppets.
He is the author of the novels OBSERVATORY MANSIONS, ALVA & IRVA, THE IREMONGER TRILOGY (HEAP HOUSE, FOULSHAM and LUNGDON), LITTLE and THE SWALLOWED MAN, all of which he illustrated. He always draws the characters he writes about, but often the illustrations contradict the writing and vice versa and getting both to agree with each other takes him far too long.
His next novel, EDITH HOLLER, will be published in the US by Riverhead in October 2023.
He has lived in England, France, Romania, Lithuania, Germany, Ireland, Denmark, and the United States. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas, which is not near the sea.
Visit Edward Carey's website
EDITH HOLLER
Literary Fiction, 400 pages, Riverhead Books. October 2023
Norfolk, 1901. England’s beloved queen has died, and her aging son has finally taken the throne. In Norwich, bright young Edith Holler spends her days among the eccentric denizens of the crumbling Holler Theatre. In fact, she has never left the building, warned by her domineering father that the playhouse will literally tumble down if she should ever leave its confines.
Fascinated by tales of the city she knows only from afar, she decides to write a play of her own: a stage adaptation of the legend of Mawther Meg, a vicious figure said to have used the blood of countless children to make the local delicacy known as Beetle Spread. But when her father suddenly announces his engagement to a peculiar, imposing woman named Margaret Unthank, heir to the actual Beetle Spread fortune, Edith scrambles to protect her father, the theatre, and her play – the one thing that’s truly hers – from the newcomer’s sinister designs.
Teeming with unforgettable characters – including the whole cast of the theatrical Holler family and the theatre bear Uncle Orson – and illuminated by the author’s trademark fantastical illustrations, EDITH HOLLER is a surprisingly modern fable of one young woman’s struggle to escape her family’s control and in so doing to craft her own creative destiny.
B: A Year in Plagues and Pencils
Illustrated/Essay, 240 pages, Gallic Books, November 2021
In March 2020, as lockdowns were imposed around the world, author and illustrator Edward Carey published a sketch on social media with a plan to keep posting a drawing a day from his family home in Austin, Texas, until life returned to normal. One hundred and fifty pencil stubs later, he was still drawing.
Carey's hand moved with world events, chronicling pandemic and politics. It reached into the past, taking inspiration from history, and escaped grim reality through flights of vivid imagination and studies of the natural world. The drawings became a way of charting time, of moving forward, and maintaining connection at a time of isolation.
This remarkable collection of words and drawings from the acclaimed author of Little and The Swallowed Man charts a tumultuous year in pencil, finding beauty amid the horror of extraordinary times.
LITTLE
Historical fiction, 430 pages, Aardvark Bureau, October 2018
Born in Alsace in 1761, the unsightly, diminutive Marie Grosholtz is quickly nicknamed ‘Little’. Orphaned at the age of six, she finds employmet in Bern, Switzerland, under the charge of reclusive anatomist, Dr Curtius. In time the unlikely pair form an unlikely bond, and together they pursue an unusual passion: the fine art of wax-modelling.
Forced to flee their city, the doctor and his protégée head for the seamy streets of Paris where they open an exhibition hall for their uncanny creations. Though revolution approaches, the curious-minded flock to see the wax heads, eager to scrutinise the faces of royalty and reprobates alike. At 'The Cabinet of Doctor Curtius', heads are made, heads are displayed, and a future is built from wax.
From the gutters of pre-revolutionary France to the luxury of the Palace of Versailles, from casting the still-warm heads of The Terror to finding something very like love, LITTLE is the unforgettable story of how a ‘bloodstained crumb of a girl’ went on to shape the world...
HEAP HOUSE
Fiction, 416 pages, Hot Key Books, September 2013
The Iremongers have taken up what was not wanted and wanted it.
Clod is an Iremonger. He lives in the Heaps, a vast sea of lost and discarded items collected from all over London. At the centre is Heap House, a puzzle of houses, castles, homes and mysteries reclaimed from the city and built into a living maze of staircases and scurrying rats. The Iremongers are a mean and cruel family, robust and hardworking, but Clod has an illness. He can hear the objects whispering. His birth object, a universal bath plug, says 'James Henry', Cousin Tummis's tap is squeaking 'Hilary Evelyn Ward-Jackson' and something in the attic is shouting 'Robert Burrington' and it sounds angry.
A storm is brewing over Heap House. The Iremongers are growing restless and the whispers are getting louder. When Clod meets Lucy Pennant, a girl newly arrived from the city, everything changes. The secrets that bind Heap House together begin to unravel to reveal a dark truth that threatens to destroy Clod's world.