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May 28th 2011
Programme & Guests
The day will start at 10 am with coffee and registration and our first panel will be at 10.30 am, the second at 11.30.
We'll break for lunch from 12.30 to 2.00 pm to allow everyone plenty of time to explore the local pubs and cafes.
We'll also be including an appreciation of the life and work of Diana Wynne Jones at 12.30 pm and a programme of short readings from 1.30 pm.
The afternoon panels will run from 2.00 pm and 3.00 pm, finishing up around 4.00 pm, allowing us an hour or so for chatting and bookbuying etc, before wrapping the day up at 5.00 pm.
We will be discussing the following topics during the day - running order to be advised when our guests' travel plans are finalised.
SF&F Awards: A Good Guide to Good Reading?
The Short Story: Trial Run, Test Piece or Something Else Entirely?
The Rise of the Paranormal in Fantasy (no, not Twilight).
The Seven Ages of Mankind: How many do we see in SF&F?
Guests
Our guests (in alphabetical order):
Pat Cadigan
is the author of fifteen books, including two nonfiction books on the making of Lost In Space and The Mummy, a young adult novel, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award winning novels Synners and Fools, and scads of shorter pieces. she lives in gritty, urban North London with her husband, the Original Chris Fowler, her musician son Robert Fenner, and Miss Kitty Calgary, Queen of the Cats
Anne Gay
is the author of four SF novels, including the highly-accalimed Mindsail and Dancing on the Volcano, which was nominated for the Arthur C Clarke Award, and four young adult novels. For four years she was the editor of the popular Science Fiction Zone for Tiscali, and has articles and short stories published in the USA and Germany. As Anne Nicholls she now concentrates on psychotherapy, having run internet problem pages for the Department of Children, Schools and Families and Tiscali. Her book Make Love Work For You was published in four continents and in languages from Spanish to Chinese. She is part of the David Gemmell Legend Award Committee.
Jon Courtenay Grimwood
has worked as a freelance writer for magazines and newspapers including The Guardian. He has been shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award twice and the BSFA Award for Best Novel seven times, winning twice. He lives in Winchester with his wife, novelist and editor of Red magazine, Sam Baker. His most recent book, The Fallen Blade blends history, politics and dark fantasy in a compelling vision of an alternate Venice.
www.www.j-cg.co.uk
Mary Hoffman
has been a journalist, academic, educational consultant, writer of picturebooks, and is currently specialising in literary, historical fantasies for teenagers, set in Italy. Italy is her great passion – its literature, language, music, climate, food and, above all, its art.
Mary’s best-known work for younger children is Amazing Grace and its sequels, about the black girl who loves stories and acting them out.
Stravaganza has changed her life again and she is now in e-mail contact with hundreds of readers.
Mary lives in a converted barn in Oxfordshire with her husband; their three daughters are grown up but are frequent visitors.
Ben Jeapes
watched far too much Dr Who at an early age and started writing science fiction at the age of 18 in the mistaken belief that it would be quite easy (it isn't). As well as 18 short stories he is also the author of His Majesty's Starship (1998), The Xenocide Mission (2002), The New World Order (2004) and Time’s Chariot (2008), plus numerous items of ghostwriting that annoyingly earn more than his own stuff.
www.benjeapes.com
Stan Nicholls
is a worldwide bestseller. His Orcs: First Blood trilogy, comprising Bodyguard of Lightning, Legion of Thunder and Warriors of the Tempest, published in the UK by Gollancz, had one million, two hundred and fifty thousand copies sold as of 2010. The associated Orcs story ‘The Taking’ was shortlisted for the 2001 British Fantasy Award. Current projects include a return to the Orcs universe with a new trilogy entitled Orcs: Bad Blood. The first volume, Weapons of Magical Destruction, was published in the UK in December 2008 (and is currently in its seventh printing); volume two, Army of Shadows, appeared in October 2009. The third volume, Inferno, is due in 2011. By 2010 the first trilogy, and books 1 and 2 of the second trilogy, had achieved over 80,000 UK library borrowings. Audiobook versions of both trilogies, read by John Lee, are being released by US company Tantor Media in 2010/2011. An original Orcs graphic novel, Forged for War, illustrated by Joe Flood, will be published by FirstSecond Books, New York, in Autumn 2011.
He is Chair of The David Gemmell Awards For Fantasy. The awards currently comprise the Legend Award, for the year’s best fantasy novel; the Morningstar Award, for best debut, and the Ravenheart Award, for best fantasy book cover art. The 2011 ceremony, our third year, will take place at the headquarters of The Magic Circle in London on 17th June.
Mike Shevdon
lives in Bedfordshire, England with his wife and son, where he combines his various interests of writing, cookery and technology with the study of martial arts, particularly archery.
His blend of real history and folklore was launched on an unsuspecting world in 2009 with his debut novel, Sixty-One Nails, published by Angry Robot Books. It interleaves forgotten legends and faerie tales with real history and ancient rituals that are still performed at the core of the realm to this day. A refreshingly different take on Urban Fantasy, The Courts of the Feyre is a series exploring humanity's relationship with the creatures that inspired the oldest of stories, weaving a modern faerie-tale into the fabric of reality. The sequel, The Road to Bedlam, was published in Autumn 2010, revealing more of the relationship between the everyday world and the secret world of magic and darkness beneath.
shevdon.com
Ian Watson
did the Screen Story for Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence
as well as quite a lot of SF novels and story collections, most recently a volume of demented tales, The Beloved of My Beloved (2009), in collaboration with Italian Surrealist Robert Quaglia, probably the only full-length genre fiction by two authors with different mother tongues. Also he writes SF poetry. He lives in a little village in Northamptonshire.
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