Join me on Saturday at 2pm on North Manchester FM for Hannah’s Bookshelf. This week, my guest will be the brill Selene Paxton-Brooks.

Born in West London within the sounds of Ealing Studios, Selene started her fascination with horror at the age of seven. She studied Graphic Design at Ealing Art School, where she refused to draw, preferring to read Michael Moorcock novels under her drawing board. In 1986, she became a magazine designer in Fleet Street and started attending the Gothique Film Society two years later and spending hours in the Scala and other small independent cinemas, watching films that she would tick off in her Horror Film Encyclopaedia. After having two children, Selene decided to retrain as a Primary Teacher and studied Folklore and Fairy Tales at Degree Level. She has been teaching for 20 years and now teaches children excluded from mainstream education.

Selene started reviewing horror films online in 2013 for Spooky Isles and has written for a variety of blogs and websites. She have recently begun to write for We Belong Dead publications, and loves researching classic horror locations, going out for trips and tours with good friends and fully immersing herself in the films that she loves. She has also recently started to write horror fiction of her own, which has been published in the BHF Book of Horror Stories 4 and 5. She also illustrates stories, and has created an illustration for each of the short stories in Spoken in Whispers, an anthology of short stories by Andrew Llewellyn and Ian Taylor, as well as painting the cover for the book.

I’ll be talking to Selene about Spoken in Whispers, and about her writing and illustration work more generally. And, of course, she’ll be sharing her selections for this week’s Apocalypse Books.

Catch the show on Saturday at 2pm on 106.6FM (if you’re in the North Manchester area) or listen online (if you’re further afield).