Toby Venables

Toby made his first film – a vampire short entitled Nightlife – at the age of 17, before embarking on a career as a journalist and copywriter, during which he won a radio advertising award, was recipient of the Keats-Shelley prize (for prose) and orchestrated a Halloween publishing hoax involving a werewolf. As a journalist, he interviewed a diverse range of subjects – including Ray Harryhausen, Cate Blanchett, Patrice Chereau, Jeff Bridges and Professor Gunther von Hagens – and developed a long-standing involvement with Cambridge Film Festival. More recently, he returned to screenwriting and developed several TV projects with occasional writing partner Felicity Evans- including Northmen, a comedy about Yorkshireman who dress as vikings, and Marlowe:Black, a supernatural drama. His first feature script – a blues-tinged psychological horror set in the Fens, entitled Black Dog – attracted the attention of Rocket Pictures, and then Starchild Pictures, with whom he is now developing a commissioned feature, Seven Thieves. He also lectures on film at Anglia Ruskin University and his viking-zombie mashup novel The Viking Dead was published in April 2011 by Abaddon Books.