As a teenager he was sent away to an austere school run by the Moravian Brotherhood in the isolated German countryside.

In the years leading up to the first world war, he produced an extra-ordinary and diverse body of occult tales: innocent campers who pitch their tent in a place where another dimension intersects with our own ('The Wendigo') the psychological transformation of a fey aristocrat ('The Regeneration of Lord Ernie') a house haunted by the echo of religious intolerance ('The Damned') a man seduced by the forest ('The Man Whom the Trees Loved').īlackwood and his four siblings were brought up with a 'unique ignorance of life' in a family of unyielding Christian beliefs. Regarding all experience as - potentially - spiritual, he believed that an understanding of nature would lead to faith and a knowledge of how to live. He understood the power of the intangible, and developed a style of writing that relied on suggestion and atmosphere. From the publication of his first collection, The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories, he had a dedicated readership hungry for his peculiar blend of nature and the supernatural.

Blackwood wrote children's fiction, plays, more than 200 stories, and novels that today would probably be classified as fantasy or science fiction.

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