Graham Joyce

Graham Joyce was a multiple award winning British author. He was born and grew up in the mining village of Keresley near Coventry. He got his bachelor’s degree in education at Bishop Lonsdale college, an MA in English and American Literature at the University of Leicester and in 2004 was awarded a PhD in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. In 1988 he quit his job in international youth work and decamped to the Greek island of Lesbos, where he lived in a beach shack with a colony of scorpions, to concentrate on writing. He sold his first novel, Dreamside, while living in Greece and travelled in the Middle East on the proceeds. After returning to live in England, he went on to write fourteen novels, five young adult novels, and an autobiographical book about his experiences as goalie for the England Writers’ football team. He also wrote numerous short stories. During his writing career Graham won many awards. His book The Facts of Life won the World Fantasy Award for best novel. He was also five-times winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel; twice winner of the French Grand Prix De L’Imaginaire; and the winner of the prestigious O Henry award for his short story ‘An Ordinary Soldier of the Queen.’ In 2008 he was awarded the Honorary degree of Master of Letters by the University of Derby. He continued to write and teach creative writing at Nottingham Trent University until his death in 2014 at the age of 59. This is what Graham’s editor Simon Spanton has to say about his writing: ‘Graham was a wonderful writer. Not showy writing . Difficult to quote a line out of context for full effect, but it was a quiet cumulative power. I was Graham’s editor for eight of his novels. Those novels weren’t always easy to categorize and as such they were sometimes not very easy to sell. But it was always a huge privilege to publish books that were so wonderful to read. But I think it was what made them difficult to label that made them wonderful to read. Were they fantasy? Magic realism? Family dramas? Was the magic in them real? Or was it in the heads of the characters? You never really knew. And that’s where the power of Graham’s writing lay. Writing that dances the line between beauty and unease, between magic and realism, between faerie and the mundane allows all of those things to mix, to inform each other. It’s a rich and rewarding brew because we’re most alive when we’re unsure. Certainty stifles the imagination and the heart. And Graham’s writing lived and breathed imagination and heart. They told you that somehow magic was the most reasonable thing to believe in. But whatever else Graham was writing about, whether he was evoking Thailand or the Midlands, London or the Mediterranean, the 1940’s, the 1970’s or today, whether describing the stillness of nature or the busyness of towns, whether writing about men or women, writers or witches, Graham was always writing about love. When people asked me what one of Graham’s books was about I’d sometimes (annoyingly) say ‘It’s about time you read it.’ Now more than ever perhaps