Welcome to the debut episode of Hollyword, a new podcast that explores the lives of history’s greatest story-tellers. Our first season, ‘Writers Under the Influence’, looks at authors whose lives and careers are, in the popular imagination, entangled with their substance addictions.

The first episode takes on Robert Louis Stevenson (RLS), author of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Stephen King, author of The Shining. RLS and Stephen are separated by a century, yet their journeys share many parallels. Aside from their very serious cocaine dependencies, both were reductively labelled as writers of penny dreadfuls, and both were phenomenally successful and popular, to the point where their populism affected their critical reputations. RLS and Stephen were dismissed as ‘minor’ authors not worthy of the respect accorded to their contemporaries. Only since the end of the twentieth, start of the twenty-first century have they have been welcomed back into the literary fold and granted the ‘serious writer’ reputations so many fans feel they deserve.