Join us to hear the true story of a devilish, nineteenth-century arsonist and national cause célèbre.
1833. After four years, twelve fires and the best efforts of London’s finest detectives, still no one had discovered the identity of the ‘devil’ with the gift of fire who was terrorizing the English countryside. With land reform sweeping through South Cambridgeshire, the unsolved scandal choked the columns of the nation’s newspapers, wrecking the reputation of the ‘ill-fated village’ of Shelford. Something had to give…
Come along – appropriately on the night before Bonfire Night – to find out how tensions were finally extinguished, and to discover the fiery fate of the notorious John Stallon…
‘It will always be like this, John thinks, this new power of mine. Like having a firework in your head.’
Your speaker this evening is the award-winning playwright Fraser Grace. During Covid he found himself without a theatre to write for, so turned to a long-held passion project – a local story from the village of Great Shelford in South Cambridgeshire, where he has lived for the past 28 years. Published by Galileo in May 2025, Firestarter is a form-busting piece of creative non-fiction based on the true story of John Stallon.
Previously, Fraser’s debut play Perpetua, won the Verity Bathgate Award and his Breakfast with Mugabe was the recipient of the Arts Council’s John Whiting Award for Best Play; it was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and directed by Antony Sher, and later broadcast by BBC Radio 3 and The World Service. Fraser is the author of a further eight plays, and currently also teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge.
Your curator and host for this event will be the author Edward Parnell, author of Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Ghostland (William Collins, 2019), a work of narrative non-fiction, is a moving exploration of what has haunted our writers and artists – as well as the author’s own haunted past; it was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley 2020 prize, an award given to a literary autobiography of excellence. Edward’s first novel The Listeners (2014), won the Rethink New Novels Prize. His latest book is Eerie East Anglia (pub. Aug 2024) for the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. For further info see: https://edwardparnell.com
Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.
[Image: detail taken from the cover of Firestarter.]
