William Hope Hodgson

Hodgson ran away from boarding school at thirteen because he wanted to go to sea. Returned to his family, he eventually won permission to begin a four-year apprenticeship as a cabin boy. The work gave him the weather, ships and physical danger that later made his maritime horrors feel reported rather than invented.

Small and bullied at sea, he trained himself with weights and a punching bag until strength became another craft. He also took photographs aboard ship and received a Royal Humane Society medal after rescuing a sailor who had fallen from the topmast into shark-infested water. Back on land he opened a school of physical culture, then turned to writing when the business failed.

The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”, The House on the Borderland, The Ghost Pirates and The Night Land appeared in a five-year run from 1907 to 1912, carrying supernatural fiction from haunted ships toward cosmic immensities. During the First World War he served in the Royal Field Artillery. He was killed near Ypres in April 1918, aged forty, leaving the strange territory he had opened to later writers.