Ursula Wills is a writer who lives in Gloucestershire, UK. She writes short stories and novels. Her story The Wicker Husband has been turned into a musical.
She is currently working on a novel set in Vienna.
Ursula loves folk tales and folklore, strange and silly goings on. She writes about the places where the ordinary bumps up against the uncanny, sometimes in unexpected ways.
Wicker Things
My short story The Wicker Husband was turned into a musical by Rhys Jennings and Darren Clark and arrived at the Watermill Theatre Newbury in 2020 – just in time to get shut down by Covid lockdowns! It still managed to get several five-star reviews. Fortunately it was able to re-open and finish its run in 2022.
I’m expecting more exciting Wicker news next month!
The Wicker Husband – along with two of my other short stories, The Time Sweepers and Vusi Makusi – were on East of the Web for ages. In case you’re looking for them, they’re not there any more. Hopefully you will be able to read them in print form soon.
For all enquiries relating to The Wicker Husband/Wicker things please contact (s-rights)
Current Work
The inhabitant of the attic in Hinterzwischengasse has been dead for some time. Nonetheless, like any self-respecting inhabitant of Vienna, he’s getting on with life: eating cake, drinking coffee, visiting his lady-friend, unburdening himself to his psychotherapist, putting up with the music student next door practising Schoenberg, and indulging in a decades-long feud with his bookseller neighbour. Please just don’t ask him how he died…
He doesn’t like talking about the early years. Back then, he was angry. He broke things. He might have killed a man. It took decades to get to a better place. Many people helped: Madame Violette, the medium who fled her own ghosts; The Major, a man determinedly stuck in the glittering Vienna lost in the Great War; and an annoying hippie guru who promotes imagining your own destiny. Most of all, kind-hearted florist Jana, who leaves her cheating husband to be with him...
But now he’s in crisis: after decades together, Jana is dying. She’s pretty relaxed about this, and has even picked a funeral director. Jana thinks after death they’ll be together. But he knows differently - she’ll move on to wherever all the dead people go, and he’ll still be stuck, in Vienna. Also, there’s bad things going on next door. And all this death is giving him flashbacks to his life...
As he unravels, he unravels his death – and life – back to front – and ends at the beginning, at last.
I’ve wanted to write a novel about Vienna ever since I first visited in 2015. It has such an interesting history and is so very full of contrasts. It’s magnificent, civilised, prosperous and sunny, but also freezing, creepy, and the site of terrible events.
I conceived the idea of the ghost in the attic as a way of moving through all these places and moods, but also because the city has a reputation for being obsessed with love and death – so that’s what the novel is about. It’s also about reinventing yourself after disaster – as the city does, so the ghost does too. But there’s always a new challenge round the corner…
