The Starlight Express is a children's play by Violet Pearn, based on the imaginative novel A Prisoner in Fairyland by Algernon Blackwood, with songs and incidental music written by the English composer Sir Edward Elgar in 1915.

Algernon Henry Blackwood, CBE was an English broadcasting narrator, journalist, novelist and short story writer, and among the most prolific ghost story writers in the history of the genre. The literary critic S. T. Joshi stated, "His work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer's except Dunsany's" and that his short story collection Incredible Adventures (1914) "may be the premier weird collection of this or any other century".