Nat Reeve is a novelist, occasional playwright, and academic, currently teaching Creative Writing at this very university. He has an AHRC-funded PhD in Victorian literature and art history from Royal Holloway, University of London, focusing on a queer reappraisal of the art and poetry of Elizabeth Siddal. Nat's debut novel Nettleblack was published by Cipher Press in 2022, and its sequel Earlyfate just came out on October 24th. Nettleblack was a 2022 Fiction Book of the Year at the LRB Bookshop and Blackwell's Manchester, and a Bookseller Fave of the Year at Waterstones Trafford Centre. The series follows a gang of queer misfit Victorian detectives causing chaos in a small country town: Nettleblack sees a runaway heir/ess turn the whole detective agency upside down, whilst Earlyfate follows those same detectives and a local non-binary cravat designer ruining each other's weeks in every possible way.