Rebecca Stott (born 1964) is a British academic, broadcaster, novelist and a professor at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of two historical thrillers, Ghostwalk (2007) and The Coral Thief (2009) a biography of Charles Darwin, Darwin and the Barnacle (2003) and an epic history of Darwin's predecessors called Darwin's Ghosts. Stott lives and works in Cambridge. She has three children. She has begun a third novel set in contemporary and Elizabethan London.
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Stott was born at Cambridge in 1964. She was raised in Brighton in a community of fundamentalist Christians called the Exclusive Brethren, a branch of the Plymouth Brethren, a cult who kept complete separation from the rest of the world in order to prepare themselves for the Rapture or the Second Coming.[1][2][3] After a schism in the 1970s, the Stotts left the sect.[1] Stott claims her love of books liberated her from 'the paranoid, black-and-white view of the world [she] grew up in.'[2]
Stott read English and Art History at the University of York, then a Master of Arts and a Ph.D also at York.[3] She taught at the University of York, the University of Leeds, then Anglia Ruskin University at Cambridge before being appointed to a chair at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. Stott now teaches half of the year at the University of East Anglia and works the other as a freelance writer.[1][4] She is also an affiliated scholar at the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.[3]
Stott's atmospheric debut novel, Ghostwalk was shortlisted for the Jelf First Novel Award and the Society of Authors First Novel Award. A ghost story, historical thriller and a love story, it relates the story of a woman, Lydia Brooke, called upon to be the ghostwriter of a book on Sir Isaac Newton's alchemy.[1] Brooke begins to think that the death of the book's author, Cambridge historian Elizabeth Vogelsang, may somehow relate to a series of unsolved seventeenth-century murders. The novel, an innovative mix of fiction and non-fiction, blends seventeenth-century accounts of plague, glassmaking, alchemy and theories of optics with a contemporary plot involving quantum physics and animal rights campaigns. The New York Times compared it to the works of Borges and Edgar Allan Poe.
Stott's second novel, The Coral Thief, set in 1815 post-Napoleonic France, is a thriller that explores religion, rationalism, and evolutionary theory while its hero, a medical student, becomes drawn into a daring jewel heist. It was serialised on Radio Four's Book at Bedtime in January 2010.[5]
Before 2003 Stott published a number of academic books including monographs or collections of essays on Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (with Simon Avery) and other aspects of Victorian culture. Since 2003 her non-fiction work has been more experimental and narrative-driven whilst still scholarly and archive-based as she has become concerned with crossing discipline boundaries and with writing for audiences beyond the academy. Darwin and the Barnacle (Faber, 2003) documented a little-explored eight-year period of Darwin's life in which he became obsessed with breaking the riddle of a single aberrant barnacle species he had found in a conch shell on a beach in Southern Chile and which led him complete an enormous work of barnacle taxonomy while his revolutionary work on natural selection lay locked away in a drawer. She has now completed an epic account of the history of evolution before Darwin which documents a 2,200 year history, a tale of heretics and free thinkers who were prepared to risk public censure or even imprisonment by asking questions that challenged religious orthodoxies. It is called Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists and will be published in in the UK by Bloomsbury and in the US by Spiegel and Grau in May 2012.