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

The winners have been picked for our Krabat and the Legend of the Satanic Mill competition. Carl Barker has won a DVD of the film, and Colin Dalglish won the book. Congratulations to both of you!

Thank you to everyone who entered the competition, but if you weren’t lucky enough to win you can still purchase a copy of the DVD from Peccadillo Pictures HERE

Following on from the recent news that Peccadillo Pictures are to release Otfried Preussler‘s fantasy epic Krabat and the Legend of the Satanic Mill to DVD (see earlier news item HERE), and thanks to Peccadillo Pictures’ generosity, we have two great items to give away in a free prize draw – the Krabat DVD and the book, which has been reprinted with the UK theatrical artwork and published through Harper Collins.

To enter this competition simply email your name by midnight (UK time) on Saturday 29 October to news@britishfantasysociety.org with the subject title KRABAT GIVEAWAY.  Sorry,  but you must be a BFS member to enter this competition (yet another reason to join!). All eligible entries will then be entered into a free prize draw. On Sunday 30 October we will draw at random two winners – one to receive the DVD and the other to receive the book.

And don’t forget our FantasyCon report competition too! See HERE for details

Fantasycon is just around the corner, and we’re looking forward to welcoming BFS members and non-members alike for what promises to be an unforgettable weekend in Brighton. The programme grid has just gone live, and you can find details of everything that’ll be going on HERE

Perhaps you’re a seasoned convention-goer. Maybe this is your first Fantasycon – or even your very first con altogether! Whether you’re a newbie or a veteran, the BFS would like to hear from you.

We want to see your reports from Fantasycon: the panels, the readings, the signings, the parties… who you saw, who you missed: your highlights. Tell us what made Fantasycon special for you in 1,000 words or fewer and we’ll put our favourite three reports on the BFS website. The best of these will also be printed in the Winter issue of our newsletter, PRISM, which is mailed out to all BFS members.

All you have to do is send your FCon report saved in .rtf format to prism@britishfantasysociety.org by 9 October 2011, along with a short bio. If you want to include photos, that’s fine with us, but please ensure you attach them individually (preferably as high-res JPEGs).

• Any kind of fantastical story is welcome. For example, fantasy, science fiction, horror, supernatural, fabulation, magic realism, slipstream, etc, or indeed any combination of those genres
• The competition is open to both members and non-members of the society, but non-members must pay a £5 entry fee
• Stories must not exceed 5,000 words
• Multiple entries are welcome, but only one free entry per BFS member
• Judging is anonymous, so stories should not have been previously published
• The decision of the judging panel will be final

• Double-spaced text
• Left and right hand margins of at least 2cm
• 12pt font
• First line of paragraphs indented
• Pages numbered, but no other text in the footer or header
• Section breaks (ellipses) should be indicated by a single hash mark (#)
• No mention of the author’s name, address or other details
• If you know how, scrub your name from the File Properties