I was saddened to learn of the death of one of our greatest fantasy writers yesterday, Graham Joyce.
I met him early on his career in 1992 when he visited the Preston Speculative Fiction Group in Lancashire not long after his first novels had been published. He delivered a fascinating talk about how he and his wife took a year out to live on a small Greek island while he concentrated on writing his first novel, all the while having to put up with such minor inconveniences as waking up to find scorpions all over the floor!
He was a regular supporter of Fantasycon and would have been MC at this year's hadn't his illness intervened. He died only a few days later.
Several years ago he was for a short time caretaker chairman of the British Fantasy Society during a period of crisis for the organisation and, though I didn't agree with everything he wanted to change in the BFS, he was, as always, as straight as a die and completely honest in his convictions. His support for the BFS was staunch over the years and he will be greatly missed in it, I am sure.
His books include Dreamside (1991), Dark Sister (1992), House of Lost Souls (1993), Requiem (1995), The Tooth Fairy (1996), The Stormwatcher (1997), The Web: Spiderbite (1997), Indigo (1999), Smoking Poppy (2001), The Facts of Life (2002), Partial Eclipse and Other Stories (2003), The Limits of Enchantment (2005), TWOC (2005), Do the Creepy Thing (2006), Three Ways to Snog and Alien (2008), Memoirs of a Master Forger (2008), The Devil's Ladder (2009), The Silent Land (2011), Some Kind of Fairy Tale (2012), The Year of the Ladybird (2013).
He left us all far too early.
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