The most recent BFS London Open Night saw the launch of Where Are We Going? from Eibonvale Press, edited by Allen Ashley. The publisher ran a “Write a Postcard” competition which was judged on the night by Allen Ashley. The winners were: Martin Roberts, Tina Rath and John Forth, and each won an Eibonvale prize. The winning postcards – and all the other entries that Allen Ashley and David Rix were able to salvage! – are now on display at the Eibonvale site. Just follow this link HERE

The winners of the inaugural Poetry Box Horror & Dark Poetry Silver Cup Trophy Award have been announced as follows:

WINNER:  Mark Mikkelsen  – ‘Ode To Night’
2nd PLACE: Riff Poynton – ‘The Dark In The Heart’
3rd PLACE: Lynn Walton – ‘Awakening’
4th PLACE: Joe Hobbs – ‘Torso In The Gutter’
5th PLACE: Lorna Hunter – ‘Anxiety Attacks’

JUDGE’S SPECIAL COMMENDATION AWARD:
Cathy Bryant – ‘Petrified’
Tracey Clark – ‘Last Supper’
Pamela Johnson – ‘The Hanging Man’
Jerry Prince – ‘The Almost’
Daniel Mills – ‘Serpents (A Ballad)’
Annie Williams – ‘The Game’

HIGHLY COMMENDED AWARD:
Jim Stewart-Evans – ‘Nightfall on All Hallows Eve’
Lucienne Kim Flavell – ‘Afterword’
B.M. Laverty – ‘Fatal Attraction’
Tom Cunliffe – ‘Blank’

All winners’ poems will be featured in the first issue of The Poetry Box Horror & Dark Poetry Magazine. For full details and how to order please see the website HERE

Arc (the science fiction magazine from the publishers of New Scientist) has teamed up with The Tomorrow Project, Intel’s futurism project, to run a competition soliciting near-future stories with a heavy technological emphasis. The winning entry will be published in issue 1.2 of Arc due in May 2012, with the winning author receiving £500. £200 will also be paid to each of five runners-up, and those stories will then be published on the Tomorrow Project website and used to stimulate conversation about our shared future.

The publishers are looking for fully fleshed stories of between 3,000 and 5,000 words. By ‘near future’ they mean near enough to be recognisable, but not so near as to be boring. Technology, in whatever guise – from robotics to synthetic biology to geoengineering – should feature prominently, but they are looking for stories, not theses, and the human element will have to be compelling.

It is recommended that entrants read issue 1.1 of Arc for guidance on the approach required. Distinctive, thoughtful visions inspired by the theme are more likely to be successful. Arc 1.1 also explains the Arc / Tomorrow Project collaboration.

The deadline for entry to the competition is one minute to midnight GMT on 8 April 2012. Full details can be found in the Tomorrow Project section of Arc 1.1, or on the Arc submission page. Arc 1.1 is available now for Windows and Mac computers, iPads, iPhones and Android devices, as well as for Kindle and as a collectible print edition.

Coming soon from theEXAGGERATEDpress – Busy Blood, a selection of combo stories by those giants of the independant press, Stuart Hughes and D. F. Lewis
Cover art by Tony Lovell

“Adroitly written tales of the fantastic for the discerning connoisseur. A wonderful synthesis of mysterious delights and freakish surprises – expect the unexpected.”
Simon Clark

Just £5.00 from the website HERE

There will also be ebook versions available in the near future.

Pre-orders are welcome
BUT…

The BFS has teamed up with theEXAGGERATEDpress to give away a SIGNED copy. Just answer these three simple questions.

• What is the name of theEXAGGERATEDpress e-zine?
• What is the current edition’s theme?
• What is the theme of the next issue?

(Hint: you can find the answers HERE)

Email your answers, along with your name, to us at news@britishfantasysociety.org by midnight (UK time) on Saturday 31 March 2012. Use the subject heading BUSY BLOOD. Please note this competition is open to BFS MEMBERS ONLY (excluding committee members).

Good luck!

Don’t forget our current free prize draw which closes at midnight (UK time) this Friday 16 March 2012!

Thanks to the generosity of Alex Davis, organiser of the Discover Festival (a weekend of SFFH in Leicestershire), we can offer one lucky winner a pair of tickets to the festival (worth £45 each).

The festival takes place at Snibston Discovery Park, Coalville, Leicestershire, over the weekend of 18 – 20 May 2012. It features well-known guests, author readings, panel discussions and workshops, and you can be there for free. This competition is open to both BFS members AND non-members, but entries from BFS members will count as TWO entries to the competition, giving members more chance of winning.

All you have to do to be in with the chance (or two chances!) of winning tickets is to answer the following easy question:

Who are the three Guests of Honour at the Discover Festival?
(HINT: The answer can be found at the Festival website HERE)

Email your answer to news@britishfantasysociety.org with the subject line DISCOVER COMPETITION, by midnight UK time on Friday 16 March 2012. Please give your name, and indicate whether you are a BFS member or non-member (if you know your membership number this would be useful too, but if you don’t know it, don’t worry as we can check this).

One lucky winner will then be randomly drawn, notified and sent their tickets as soon as possible thereafter. Remember, if you’re a BFS member you only need to email once and your entry will be counted TWICE, giving you more chance of winning. But if you haven’t yet decided to join the BFS you can still enter the competition (you might like to think about joining too though – which you can do HERE). BFS committee members are, of course, excluded from entering the competition.

Good luck!

We have a fabulous prize up for grabs in another free prize draw! Thanks to the generosity of Alex Davis, organiser of the Discover Festival (a weekend of SFFH in Leicestershire), we can offer one lucky winner a pair of tickets to the festival (worth £45 each).

The festival takes place at Snibston Discovery Park, Coalville, Leicestershire, over the weekend of 18 – 20 May 2012. It features well-known guests, author readings, panel discussions and workshops, and you can be there for free. This competition is open to both BFS members AND non-members, but entries from BFS members will count as TWO entries to the competition, giving members more chance of winning.

All you have to do to be in with the chance (or two chances!) of winning tickets is to answer the following easy question:

Who are the three Guests of Honour at the Discover Festival?
(HINT: The answer can be found at the Festival website HERE)

Email your answer to news@britishfantasysociety.org with the subject line DISCOVER COMPETITION, by midnight UK time on Friday 16 March 2012. Please give your name, and indicate whether you are a BFS member or non-member (if you know your membership number this would be useful too, but if you don’t know it, don’t worry as we can check this).

One lucky winner will then be randomly drawn, notified and sent their tickets as soon as possible thereafter. Remember, if you’re a BFS member you only need to email once and your entry will be counted TWICE, giving you more chance of winning. But if you haven’t yet decided to join the BFS you can still enter the competition (you might like to think about joining too though – which you can do HERE). BFS committee members are, of course, excluded from entering the competition.

Watch out for further MEMBER-ONLY competitions coming soon too!

This years’ BFS Short Story Competition will be judged by award-winning editor and BFS stalwart Allen Ashley.

Allen Ashley is an author, editor, poet, critic and writing tutor as well as a long-standing, active member of the BFS. Allen is a regular contributor to The BFS Journal and attendee at FantasyCon. Allen won the BFS award for Best Anthology in 2006 as editor of The Elastic Book Of Numbers (Elastic Press).

Allen says: “Judging a competition is something I have wanted to add to my accomplishments for a long time, so I’m really pleased to be given this opportunity. I’m sure it’s going to be a tough decision to choose the eventual winners as I know that the standard is always very high. There’s just me judging – no filtering committee or anything like that. Also, this year it’s not anonymous as that was felt to be an unnecessary complication. Word limit is 5000 words and all the usual rules apply. Submission window opens on 1 March 2012 and closes on 30 June 2012.”

Entry is free for BFS members and just £5 per entry for non-members. Further details and full submission guidelines HERE

For enquiries please email Allen on shortstorycomp@britishfantasysociety.org

An animation competition has been launched by The Literary Platform “inviting creatives to produce an animation that illustrates a rare and prophetic audio recording of Douglas Adams talking in 1993 about the Evolution of the Book.

In 1993 Douglas Adams, the world-renowned author of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, recorded a short piece of audio for his US publisher of the time – Bob Stein of Voyager Expanded Books. Who would know how prophetic his words would sound nearly twenty years later, and how accurate his sense of the evolution of the book was.

In this short recording, kindly donated to The Literary Platform by Bob Stein, Douglas Adams charts the evolution of the book from the ‘hardware problems’ of writing on rocks, to scrolls, to the bound book and finally the silicon chip.”

The deadline for uploading entries to the competition platform is 15 April 2012, and full details of how to enter, the prizes, and the judges can be found HERE

A competiton has been set up to celebrate the launch of a new UK-based horror, gothic horror and dark poetry monthly magazine, The Poetry Box Horror & Dark Poetry ScrapBook, which will be edited, compiled and published by the founder of The Poetry Box Studio in Hampshire, L.K. Barley Robinson. The competition is The Poetry Box International Horror, Gothic-Horror & Dark Poetry Silver Trophy Cup Competition 2012. It represents a new competition in these unusual poetry genres and the winners and finalist entries, and a number of commended entries, will be published in the inaugural issue of The ScrapBook – Publication date: 1 April 2012.

The entries will be judged by the editor L.K. Barley Robinson who is an award-winning, much-published and radio-broadcast horror, gothic horror and dark poet and a former magazine columnist with The Observer series of newspapers. The first prize winner will receive The Poetry Box Horror & Dark Poetry Silver Trophy Cup and Award-Winning Certificate. The 2nd and 3rd placed finalists will receive Award-Winning Certificates and prize cheques of £25.00 each.  The 4th and 5th placed finalists will receive Award-Winning Certificates and prize cheques of £20.00 each, and highly commended entries will receive Highly Commended Certificates.

The deadline for poetry entries is 1 March 2012.  Length of poem: 60 lines maximum per poem.  Entry fee is £5.00 per poem, up to a maximum of 4 poems per entrant.  All entrants agree that their poems may be selected for inclusion in The Horror & Dark Poetry ScrapBook Magazine for up to one year after the competition deadline (1 March 2013).

The Poetry Box Studio is open to the public every Wednesday between 9.00am to 6.30pm with live poetry readings performed by a programme of visiting poets between 10.30am-11.15am in the garden of the Studio.  On display within The Poetry Box are poetry prints, poetry posters, new and secondhand poetry books and gothic horror and horror props, postcards and miscellanea.

Full details of the competition can be found HERE and information on the new magazine can be found HERE

Illustration: ‘The Death of Boadicea” (c) L.K. Barley Robinson

The winner of the BFS’s latest competition – to win three books from Exaggerated Press – is Jay Eales. Copies of Apoidea by Douglas Thompson, Mostly Monochrome Stories by John Travis and The Exaggerated Man and Other Stories by Terry Grimwood will be on their way to our lucky winner shortly.

The answer to the question posed for the competition – what is the title of the upcoming anthology from Exaggerated Press – is, of course, The Monster Book for Girls. This book is now available. It is edited by Terry Grimwood, has cover art by Steve Upham, and features stories and poetry by Allen Ashley, Rachel Kendall, Farah Ghuznavi, Gary Fry, Marc Lyth, Ian Sales, Kat Fullerton, Shay Darrach, Samantha Porter, Rosanne Robinowitz, Stuart Young, Kelly Rose Pflug-Black, Lorraine Slater, Andrew Hook, Nicole Papaioannou, Derek John, Jessica Lawrence, Gary McMahon, Tony Lovell, Terry Grimwood, Stephen Bacon, Sarah Hilary, Mark Howard Jones, Jamie Rosen, John Travis, John Forth, Regina de Burca and David Rix.

Full details HERE