Since beginning his career as a writer in the 1970s, Graham Masterton has developed into one of the world’s bestselling and critically-acclaimed horror authors. Masterton is most famed for titles such as Broken Angels alongside his earliest novel The Manitou. Casting the star Tony Curtis as its lead, this novel would later come to be adapted into a successful film produced directed by William Girdler. Despite his fame as a horror writer, Masterton’s novels also span many other genres, including historical sagas, thrillers, disaster and crime novels.
Masterton has always utilised his advantageous position within the horror genre to give charitably to others. For a time, Masterton was the editor of Scare Care, a horror anthology published for the benefit of abused children in Europe and the United States. More recently, after visiting Wolow in 2017, the maximum security prison in Southern Poland, Masterton set up an annual short story contest, the Graham Masterton Written In Prison Award.
Masterton has received many notable prizes for his work: the novel Charnel House received a Special Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America whilst Tengu was awarded a Silver Medel by the West Coast Review of Books. In 1988, Masterton’s Family Portrait, an imaginative re-working of Oscar Wilde’s notorious novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, received the prestigious Prix Julia Verlanger. Masterton is the only non-French person to win this prize. In 2019 Masterton was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Horror Writers’ Association, in recognition of his many achievements.