Edward Parnell is the author of the award-winning Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country (2019), which was shortlisted for the 2020 PEN Ackerley Prize for memoir and autobiography. He is also the author of the Norfolk-set novel The Listeners (2014).

In 2024, he edited Eerie East Anglia: Fearful Tales of Field and Fen, his first anthology of ghost stories for the British Library's "Tales of the Weird" series. He has taught at both the University of East Anglia and the University of Cambridge.