VICTORIAN GOTHIC ROMANCE
Kathryn Colvin - About
One way or another, I’ve always been writing something weird. I got my start dictating surrealistic and entirely unhinged monster stories to my grandfather “Moon Rock” before I could spell the words myself, later wrote and performed in theatrical adaptations of Tolkien novels, and then wrote and directed my own feature-length retro superhero sci-fi B-movie, The Teenage Mummies from Beyond, shown at an independent movie theater in Portland, Oregon. During my time in college (some years after high school) I majored in English literature, published peer-reviewed articles as an undergrad, and successfully avoided taking any creative writing courses.
Now a novelist and an independent researcher, my writing is the fruit of a lifelong passion for storytelling and the strange. Inspired by my interests in the Gothic, the supernatural, romance, Romanticism, folklore, and pop culture—particularly the love lives and influence of the Byronic hero and Elizabethan villain-hero—my academic work includes articles in the journals Brontë Studies and Mythlore, and my debut Victorian Gothic romance novel is Doctor D'Arco, Sorcerer of London.
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Awards for my writing:
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Winner, Best 2024 Debut, r/FantasyRomance 2024 Readers' Choice Awards: Doctor D'Arco, Sorcerer of London.
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Winner, 2022 Mabel Owen Scholarship, University of Missouri: “‘A Nearness to Tremendousness’: The Power of the Unmoored Mind in Dickinson.”
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Winner, 2022 Hightower English Essay Award, University of Missouri: “The ‘List’ and the Tryst: Absent and Present Forbidden Encounters in Sonnet Form.”
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Second Place, 2022 Frances W. Kerr Award for Excellence in Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction, and Drama - Creative Nonfiction Category, University of Missouri: “Milkweed Flower.”
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Winner, 2022 University Libraries Undergraduate Research Contest, University of Missouri: “Hamlet and His Solution: ‘How All Occasions’ as Objective Correlative on Page and Screen.”
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Winner, 2021 Arthur F. and James C. Carson Scholarship, University of Missouri: “A ‘Furnace-Burning Heart’: Shakespeare’s Richard III as Heroic Villain.”
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Winner, 2020 Jacaranda Essay Contest - Literature Category, Long Beach City College: “A ‘Furnace-Burning Heart’: Shakespeare’s Richard III as Heroic Villain.”
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Website designed by moi.
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Website illustration credits:
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Doctor D’Arco book cover and emblem by Ronen Blanquera (www.ronenblanquera.com), 2023.
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Contact page: Woodcut by Hermann Freihold Plüddemann (engraving by F. Reusche) from Deutsches Balladenbuch, 1852, illustrating Gottfried August Bürger's 1773 poem “Lenore” (www.oldbookillustrations.com).
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404 page: Woodcut by Horace Castelli (engraving by Narcisse Navellier) from Les mystères de la science by Louis Figuier, ca. 1880 (www.oldbookillustrations.com).
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