Catriona Ward

A child with a voracious appetite for reading and a fertile imagination, Catriona Ward is today regarded as one of the leading exponents of that literary genre where Gothic meets thriller. Here, she traces her chaotic early education experiences, her discovery of the joy of learning at Bedales and how writing won out over acting as her artistic and professional choice. 

“Education wasn’t a consistent concept to me when I was young”, Catriona says with remarkable understatement. The daughter of English parents, her father’s job as an economist with the World Bank meant that Catriona was born in Washington DC and subsequently spent most of her formative years being shuttled around far-flung corners of the globe. Kenya, Madagascar (“I remember a school there with about five other children”), Yemen and Morocco were among the early ports of call in Catriona’s life. 

Her early education also included an unhappy year-long sojourn at a boarding school in Kent. “I was about 12 it was all wrong for me,” Catriona says. “Here I was, essentially a feral kid out of Madagascar at a place that was way too formal and too rigid for me and I was miserable. So I bounced around from system to system, including back in DC, and managed to miss out on GCSEs more or less completely. The great joy to me was that along the way I discovered that I was good at English, like my English teacher mother before me, and reading became the centre of my universe.” 

Playing into Catriona’s facility with language was a highly developed imagination, most starkly manifested in a recurring night terror in which she was convinced that she could feel a hand in the small of her back that was pushing her out of bed. “I would have been 13 back then and it’s a feeling that everyone has at that kind of age or at least everyone has emotional access to that kind of fear of the dark,” she observes. 

Gothic and horror fiction duly became a central part of Catriona’s already prodigious reading obsession. “The Monkey’s Paw was the first story I read of that kind and it immediately spoke to me. I had something that could help me to explain, rationalise and even thrill to those feelings that had previously only haunted me,” she explains. “I was still frightened – still am, even today, which the kind of writer I am has to be, in my opinion – but I was able to tackle my fears head on now."

Such an imaginative youngster would have seemed to be an obvious candidate for Bedales, which is where Catriona finally arrived in 1996. “My parents were in Yemen by then and boarding at Bedales seemed the best compromise to them for the next step in my education,” she recalls. “I was nervous about boarding school, remembering my antipathy towards the traditional experience, and when I arrived for the Sixth Form there were obviously already a lot of friendship groups in existence. I made a lot of really good and different friendships, as opposed to being part of a clique – Bedales had a lot of people who like me were stubborn and bloody-minded! I always think that there is a commonality of experience, almost a type of radar through which an OB can tell the presence of another Old Bedalian.” 

Settling into the English countryside was relatively easily accomplished. “A lot of my time was spent outside in the countryside or when I was indoors, the library and the theatre,” Catriona relates. “Becoming an actor was very much in my thoughts at the time and I enjoyed taking part in various performances at Bedales – Cabaret is one that springs to mind.” 

On the academic side, Catriona took A Levels in English, History and Theatre Studies, particularly and unsurprisingly excelling in English. “Calling teachers by their first names was one of the many ways in which I felt relaxed enough to give of my best,” she says. “We were gently guided but at the same time I felt that I had never been so well taught anywhere. Graham Banks was a particular influence; I remember him being so encouraging about an early short story of mine and I also recall with gratitude the kindness of people like Alastair Langlands. I didn’t do so well at History, unfortunately. Ruth Whiting was amazing but I think looking back that I didn’t have a long enough run-up to the subject.” 

Such was Catriona’s ability that she won a place to read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, before which she spent her gap year doing a foundation course in drama. “I felt ready to move on from Bedales and I was excited to start the next stage and to form a life of my own,” she says. 

It was after Oxford that Catriona realised her dreams of treading the boards or appearing on the silver screen were unlikely to be turned into reality. “It’s just so tough to be an actor and I froze in auditions whenever I went up for them,” she says. “I have huge respect for the iron constitution that most actors have but I decided that the stress and unhappiness that often go with it were not for me. I had grown hugely at Bedales as a person – it was where I learned to think and certainly where I learned to structure an essay and it was there that I first developed true love for my subject. That can be a double-edged sword for a writer. My reverence for the canon of literature made me simultaneously unsure whether I would ever be able to contribute something worthwhile to it.” 

While she went to work for a human rights foundation in London (“in some ways a synthesis of most of my early experiences”), Catriona also laboured fitfully on what would become a sprawling Gothic novel and her first published work. All told, Rawblood was seven years in the making, part of which took place while Catriona was taking a Master’s in creative writing at the University of East Anglia (UEA). “I needed a catalyst and that course forced me to marry the critical academic side with my creative impulses,” she explains. “One thing I learned about books at UEA is that they often don’t make sense until you’re almost at the point of finishing them!” 

Rawblood, the product of Catriona’s kaleidoscope of literary influences from the Gothic genre, including Henry James, Stanley Jackson and Wilkie Collins, finally appeared in 2015 and was followed into publication by the award-winning Little Eve. However, it was her third novel, The Last House on Needless Street, published in 2021, that truly lifted Catriona into the ranks of the literary great and good. Critical interest and appreciation were immediately widespread for this anarchic thriller and the film rights for the book have subsequently been optioned by Antiquarium, the production company brainchild of the actor Andy Serkis. 

“I can finally call myself a novelist now, which was not always a title that sat comfortably with me,” Catriona reflects. “The Last House on Needless Street was definitely my big break although success is a strange thing in that it doesn’t always spring from what you imagine is your best work. I appreciate my good fortune – a lot of writers don’t have the success they deserve and some don’t handle their success too well. For me, I hope it helps me along the way to a long life and a long career. My editor told me recently that I always seem to produce something different with each book and that’s precisely my intention. I’m trying to draw back a curtain and reveal the raw reality of human experience and to achieve that, I can’t write to a brief or try to anticipate a trend – it just wouldn’t be productive for me.” 

Catriona is now fully focused on future ambitions. “I want to improve at writing screenplays, which are very a different discipline from novels,” she says. It’s much harder to do well but I would love to be good at both. And then I’ve always felt that I had a play inside me that needed to be written. Something to do with the ghost of a drowned woman…..all these influences I’ve had will come out at some point!” 

In tracing her path to her current place in the literary sun, Catriona returns frequently to her Bedales years. “Bedales provided me with an imaginative space which could cope with my patchwork education and taught me to appreciate learning,” she says. 

Catriona Ward was interviewed by James Fairweather in Autumn 2023