This year’s David Gemmell Awards For Fantasy were presented on 15 June 2012 in a ceremony held at London’s Magic Circle headquarters.

The winners were:
Ravenheart Award (best cover art): Raymond Swanland – Blood of Aenarion
Morningstar Award (best debut): Helen Lowe – Heir of Night
Legend Award (best novel): Patrick Rothfuss – The Wiseman’s Fear

It was also announced that next year’s Gemmell Awards ceremony will take place as part of the 2013 World Fantasy Convention.

The convention takes place in Brighton, UK between 31 October and 3 November 2013.  The only other times that the World Fantasy Convention has moved outside North America was in 1988 and 1997, when it was staged in London, so we feel privileged to be a part of this prestigious international event.

Held at Brighton’s Metropole Hotel and the West Pier, WFC 2013 boasts an impressive line-up of guests, including Richard Matheson, Richard Christian Matheson, Brian Aldiss, Alan Lee and Tessa Farmer.  The Master of Ceremonies is China Mieville; and a host of other authors, artists, publishers and industry insiders will also be attending.

For full details of the convention visit the official website HERE

As the Gemmell Awards will be presented in October/November next year, and not in mid-June as usual, the voting cycle will be altered to accommodate the change of date.  To keep abreast of the changes check the awards website where you can sign-up for the free newsletter. The change of venue and date is for one year only – 2014 will see the awards returning to the Magic Circle.

World Fantasy Convention 2013 is honoured to welcome multiple award-winning author, poet, artist, actor and raconteur Brian W. Aldiss as its second Special Guest.

Brian has written in almost every genre, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, historical and humorous fiction, as well as non-fiction and poetry. Among his many acclaimed novels are Non-Stop, The Primal Urge, Hothouse, Greybeard, Earthworks, An Age (aka Cryptozoic!), Report on Probability A, Barefoot in the Head, Frankenstein Unbound (filmed by Roger Corman in 1990), The Malacia Tapestry, Brothers of the Head, Moreau’s Other Island, The Helliconia Trilogy (Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer and Helliconia Winter), Dracula Unbound, Jocasta, Walcot and Finches of Mars.

A multiple winner of the Hugo, Nebula, British Science Fiction and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards, Brian Aldiss was named Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 2000. On 11 June 2005 he was awarded the title of Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to literature in H.M. Queen Elizabeth II’s Birthday Honours list.

“Of course I am radiant to be asked as a Special Guest to the World Fantasy Con,” says Brian, “particularly since it is to be held in Brighton – do our overseas guests know what a gorgeous place Brighton is?”

Brian Aldiss joins previously announced Author Guests of Honour Richard Matheson and Richard Christian Matheson, Artist Guest of Honour Alan Lee, Special Guest Tessa Farmer and Master of Ceremonies China Mieville, in the picturesque and vibrant seaside town of Brighton, on the south coast of England, over the weekend of 31 October – 3 November 2013.

Although the convention is still more than a year away there are already more than 500 registered memberships! Please be aware that there is a firm limit on the number of Attending Members, so once the convention is sold out there will be no more memberships available. Remember, the 2012 World Fantasy Convention in San Diego sold out eight months prior to the event, so the sooner you join, the sooner you are guaranteed a place. Plus the membership rate will increase at regular intervals as the convention approaches.

Check the website for information on how to join.

As part its historical theme of “Arthur Machen @ 150”, World Fantasy Convention 2013 is pleased to welcome acclaimed British sculptor Tessa Farmer as a Special Guest to Brighton.

The great-granddaughter of the influential Welsh fantasy writer, she works with sculptural installation, stop-motion animation and drawing to explore the fantastical world of a species of insect-sized malevolent skeletal fairies that have existed since the late 1990s. Not unsurprisingly, the artist acknowledges that her great-grandfather’s fiction has been an important influence upon her own work.

Tessa Farmer studied Fine Art at The University of Oxford, and in 2007, she was artist in residence at London’s The Natural History Museum. Her solo exhibitions in 2011 include “Nymphidia” at London’s Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art Gallery, and “ISAM: Control Over Nature”, a collaboration with DJ and producer Amon Tobin, at the city’s Crypt Gallery.

“I am delighted to have been invited to attend the World Fantasy Convention in 2013,” she says, “and for the opportunity to show my work alongside inspirational and influential artists and writers. I am looking forward to celebrating the anniversary of Arthur Machen’s birth amongst equally inspirational enthusiasts. (What I really mean is that the evil fairies are excited about parasitising all these great minds . . . I think they are in for a treat!)”

Tessa Farmer joins previously announced Author Guests of Honour Richard Matheson and Richard Christian Matheson, Artist Guest of Honour Alan Lee, and Master of Ceremonies China Mieville, in the picturesque and vibrant seaside town of Brighton, on the south coast of England, over the weekend of 31 October – 3 November 2013. For further information and how to book please see the website HERE

Here is a round up of recent Awards news:

The 2011 Bram Stoker Award winners and Vampire Novel of the Century Award winner have been announced by the Horror Writers’ Association HERE. BFS member Allyson Bird secures the Award of Superior Achievement in a First Novel for Isis Unbound (Dark Regions Press). Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend was presented with the one-off Vampire Novel of the Century Award.

Shortlisted works for the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award have been announced as follows:
Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear (Gollancz)
The End Specialist by Drew Magary (Harper Voyager)
Embassytown by China Miéville (Macmillan)
The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers (Sandstone Press)
Rule 34 by Charles Stross (Orbit)
The Waters Rising by Sheri S.Tepper (Gollancz)

Several SFFH authors have been long-listed for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2012, including Nina Allan, Robert Shearman, Simon Kurt Unsworth, David Rix and Dave Jeffery. Full details HERE.

The 2011 Aurealis Awards finalists have been announced. The full list of finalists can be found on the SFScope website HERE. The Aurealis Awards “recognise the achievements of Australian science fiction, fantasy and horror writers”.

Finally, the five judges for the 2012 Philip K. Dick Award have been named as Bruce Bethke, Sydney Duncan, Daryl Gregory, Bridget McKenna and Paul Witcover. See details HERE.

World Fantasy Convention 2013 is pleased to announce that Academy Award- and World Fantasy Award-winning illustrator Alan Lee will be its Artist Guest of Honour in Brighton. Alan Lee began his career working as a commercial artist, contributing work to dozens of paperback book covers, including reissues of The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories edited by Robert Aickman and R. Chetwynd-Hayes. After moving in the mid-1970s to a small village on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon, he shared a studio with Brian Froud and together they created the groundbreaking illustrated book Faeries.

The success of this picture book gave the artist the freedom to spend several years bringing the Celtic myth of The Mabinogion to life, and he went on to create the delicate watercolour illustrations for Castles by David Day, Michael Palin’s The Mirrorstone (in collaboration with Richard Seymour), The Moon’s Revenge by Joan Aiken and Merlin Dreams by Peter Dickinson, along with numerous book cover designs.

However, Alan Lee is best known for his association with perhaps the greatest fantasy author of all time, illustrating the 1,200-page centenary edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Artist and author soon became inextricably linked through such collaborations as Tolkien’s World: Paintings of Middle-Earth, the 1993 J.R.R. Tolkien Calendar (and many subsequent editions), Realms of Tolkien: Images of Middle-Earth, a new edition of The Hobbit, The Children of Húrin, Tales from the Perilous Realm and David Day’s non-fiction study Tolkien’s Ring.

The artist’s work for Rosemary Sutcliff’s Black Ships Before Troy received the prestigious Kate Greenaway Award in 1993 for distinguished work in the illustration of children’s books in the UK. In 1998 he won the World Fantasy Award for Best Artist.

Alan Lee has also enjoyed an equally successful career as a conceptual designer for movies, and his credits include Legend, Erik the Viking, the Jane Yolen-scripted Merlin and the Dragons, the 2005 King Kong and the 1998 TV mini-series Merlin.

Director Peter Jackson contacted the artist to work on his acclaimed cinematic trilogy of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King. After being nominated for The Two Towers the year before, in 2004 Alan Lee won an Oscar for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration for his work on The Return of the King. The artist is currently based in New Zealand, where he is working again with Jackson on the eagerly-anticipated prequels The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and The Hobbit: There and Back Again.

“I’m very flattered to be asked to be Artist Guest of Honour,” says Alan Lee, “and happy to accept the invitation. I’m meant to be finishing on The Hobbit movies some time this year. My work on the The Lord of the Rings films went on for six years beyond what I was originally anticipating, but even if I am still involved I can arrange my annual trip back to England to coincide with the convention. I look forward to seeing everyone in 2013!”

Alan Lee joins previously announced Author Guests of Honour Richard Matheson and Richard Christian Matheson, along with Master of Ceremonies China Mieville, in the picturesque and vibrant seaside town of Brighton, on the south coast of England, over the weekend of 31 October – 3 November 2013.

Full details and booking information on the website HERE

‘The Century’s Best Horror Fiction in two hardcover volumes, edited by John Pelan.

Featuring Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Shirley Jackson, Robert Bloch, Charles Beaumont, Jack Ketchum, Gary Brandner, Dennis Etchison, Michael Bishop, Ramsey Campbell, David Schow, Joe R. Lansdale, Elizabeth Massie, Thomas Ligotti, Robert Aickman, Poppy Z. Brite, Lucy Taylor, Stephen Laws, Brian Hodge, Glen Hirshberg, Tim Lebbon, W.W. Jacobs, H.G. Wells, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, Manly Wade Wellman, Theodore Sturgeon, David A. Riley, Joel Lane, Fritz Lieber, Ian Watson and many others!

Cemetery Dance Publications commissioned a spectacular two-volume anthology project under the editorship of noted author and historian of the horror genre, John Pelan.

John selected one story published during each year of the 20th Century (1901-2000) as the most notable story of that year — all 100 stories were then collected in this amazing two volume set to be published as The Century’s Best Horror Fiction.

The ground rules were simple: Only one selection per author. Only one selection per year.

Two huge volumes, one hundred authors, one hundred classic stories, more than 700,000 words of fiction — history in the making!’

Pre-orders now being taken at the Cemetery Dance WEBSITE

In keeping with its primary theme of “The Next Generation”, World FantasyCon has announced living legend Richard Matheson and his son Richard Christian Matheson as its first author Guests of Honour to World Fantasy Convention 2013,  from 31 October – 3 November 2013 in Brighton.

Richard Matheson is a master of modern science fiction, fantasy and horror, and Stephen King credits him with single-handedly regenerating a stagnant genre. His best known novels include the influential I Am Legend, The Shrinking Man, A Stir of Echoes, Hell House, The World Fantasy Award-winning Bid Time Return and What Dreams May Come, all of which have been turned into movies. His latest novel, Other Kingdoms, is about witchcraft and fairies in a rural English village.

He also scripted fourteen episodes of Rod Serling’s iconic The Twilight Zone TV series (including the classic ‘Nightmare at 20,000 Feet’), and has produced movies including The Fall of the House of Usher, Pit and the Pendulum, Tales of Terror, The Raven, The Comedy of Terrors, The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil’s Bride), Duel, The Legend of Hell House, Somewhere in Time, Jaws 3-D and the two ‘Kolchak’ TV movies, The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler.

Richard Matheson was awarded the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984 and the World Horror Convention’s Living Legend Award in 2000. In 2006 he was presented with The Legend Award by Ray Bradbury in Los Angeles.

Richard Christian Matheson began his career in the late 1970s. At twenty, he became the youngest writer ever signed to an overall deal with Universal Studios and he wrote scripts for a number of network TV shows. He moved into feature film writing, working with Steven Spielberg on Harry and the Hendersons and Three O’Clock High. To date, he has written, co-written and sold over twelve spec screenplays – considered a record.

He is considered a master of the short-short story and has published more than seventy stories of psychological horror in magazines and major anthologies. Thirty of his critically acclaimed stories are collected in Scars and Other Distinguishing Marks with a Foreword by Stephen King and an Introduction by Dennis Etchison. His second collection, Dystopia, gathers sixty stories with an Introduction by Richard Matheson and an Afterword by Peter Straub. The volume also includes tributes about RC’s writing from Clive Barker, Ellen Datlow, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Ray Bradbury, Stephen Jones, Ramsey Campbell and many others. Matheson’s debut novel, Created By, was a Bram Stoker Award nominee and his magic-realism novella, The Ritual of Illusion, will soon be available from PS Publishing.

Richard Matheson and Richard Christian Matheson will join previously announced Master of Ceremonies, China Mieville (author of Perdido Street Station, The City & the City, Kraken and Embassytown), in Brighton over Hallowe’en weekend 2013.

For full details and how to join visit the website HERE

“IDW Publishing is proud to announce Road Rage, a new partnership with best-selling authors Stephen King and Joe Hill, to produce a comic book adaptation of their co-written adventure tale, Throttle. This monthly two-part series begins in February 2012, and will be followed by two issues adapting the story that inspired Throttle – Richard Matheson’s classic tale of suspense, Duel – beginning in April.

Throttle, the first collaboration between father and son King and Hill, was not only inspired by Matheson’s Duel, it also only appeared in print in a limited-edition anthology honouring Matheson’s works, He is Legend. Throttle and Duel were subsequently released as an audiobook called Road Rage, which is the banner title the comics will also carry.”