Graham Joyce (1954-2014)
Author Graham Joyce, 59, died September 9, 2014. He was diagnosed with aggressive lymphoma in 2013 and had been undergoing treatment. Joyce is best known for his acclaimed award-winning novels, which cross the borderlines of fantasy, horror, dark fantasy, and the paranormal.
Graham William Joyce was born October 22, 1954 in Keresley, England, a mining village near Coventry, and grew up there. He received a BEd from Bishop Lonsdale College in 1977, an MA in Modern English and American Literature from Leicester University in 1980, and a PhD from Nottingham University. (He wrote his Masters dissertation on Thomas Pynchon.) He married Suzanne Johnsen in 1988 and left England to spend a year on the Greek isle of Lesbos while writing first novel Dreamside.
Dreamside appeared in 1991, followed by British Fantasy Award winner Dark Sister (1992); House of Lost Dreams (1993), set in Greece; British Fantasy Award winner Requiem (1995), set in Jerusalem; British Fantasy Award winner The Tooth Fairy (1996); British Fantasy Award winner The Stormwatcher (1998); Indigo (1999); Smoking Poppy (2001); World Fantasy Award winner The Facts of Life (2002); The Limits of Enchantment (2005); British Fantasy Award winner Memoirs of a Master Forger (2008), published in the UK under the pseudonym William Heaney (the book’s narrator), and under his own name in the US as How To Make Friends With Demons (2009); The Silent Land (2011); British Fantasy Award winner Some Kind of Fairy Tale (2012); and The Year of the Ladybird (2013; in the US as The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit, 2014).
About ten years ago he began writing books for teens, including TWOC (2005 winner of the Angus Award), Do the Creepy Thing (2006; in the US as The Exchange, 2008), Three Ways to Snog an Alien (2008), and The Devil’s Ladder (2009).
Joyce wrote several notable short stories, including British fantasy finalist “Black Dust” (2001); Tiptree Award finalists “Eat Reecebread” (1994, with Peter F. Hamilton) and “Pinkland” (1998); British Fantasy and International Horror Guild Award finalist “Leningrad Nights” (1999); International Horror Guild Award nominee “Candia” (2000); and O. Henry prize winner “An Ordinary Soldier of the Queen” (2008). Some of his short fiction was collected in Partial Eclipse and Other Stories (2003).
Joyce taught creative writing to graduate students at Nottingham Trent University. He lived in Leicester with his wife Suzanne Johnsen and their two children, who survive him.
See the October issue of Locus for a complete obituary.