Simon Bacon

Something of a perennial late-starter there were a few detours before I was bitten by the vampire and become an author and writer. I graduated from Art School in the early 1980s and started a furniture business exhibiting in Milan, Cologne and NewYork, selling hand made designs through Harrod’s of London. From there I moved into fabric creations, being helicoptered to remote castles in Scotland to tent four-poster beds and making quilts for royalty. However, I returned to education in the early 2000s and studied Art & Philosophy at Birkbeck University and Cultural Memory at the University of London where I completed my thesis on the vampire film as a site of cultural memory. I continued my research in London but it was not long before I met my soulmate and future wife at a conference on ‘Evil Women’ in Prague and moved to Poznań in Poland where we live with our two children. Once there I have been able to focus more fully on all things monstrous and vampiric and have written many journal articles, and chapters as well as editing and writing books.

I focus on monsters in general and vampires in particular exploring their possible meanings within contemporary society, in terms of gender, ethnicity and identity politics. To this end I have edited various Companions that examine this in terms of The Gothic (2018), Horror (2019), Monsters (2020), Toxic Cultures (2021), and The Undead in the 21st Century (forthcoming). Alongside this I am writing an extended series of books on Vampires in popular culture with three published so far and the next due out in early 2021.