TANITH LEEAuthor Guest of Honour TANITH LEE was born in North London in 1947. Because her parents were professional dancers (ballroom, Latin American) and had to live where the work was, she attended a number of truly terrible schools, and didn't learn to read—she is also dyslectic—until she was almost eight-years-old. She finally mastered her reading only because her father taught her. This opened the world of books to her, and by the age of nine she was writing. Read More... |
DAVID CASEAuthor Guest of Honour DAVID CASE was born in upstate New York in 1937. Since the early 1960s he has lived in London, as well as spending time in Greece and Spain. His acclaimed collection The Cell: Three Tales of Horror appeared in 1969, and included the classic werewolf novella of the title. It was followed by the books Fengriffen: A Chilling Tale, Wolf Tracks and The Third Grave, the latter appearing from Arkham House in 1981. Read More... |
LES EDWARDSArtist Guest of Honour LES EDWARDS was born in 1949 in Walthamstow, East London. He began his illustration career immediately on leaving the notorious Hornsey College of Art in 1972. In the years that followed he became a stalwart of the UK illustration scene, acknowledged for both his versatility and his professionalism. He has worked for all the major UK publishing houses and for many in the US, and his work has also encompassed advertising, gaming, record and CD covers, and movie posters. Read More... |
DAVE CARSONArtist Guest of Honour DAVE CARSON was born in Northern Ireland in 1955. He first discovered the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft when he came across 'The Lurking Fear' in a 1960s issue of The Magazine of Horror. He was hooked for life and has since become one of the genre's most acclaimed and respected illustrators of the author's work. It was probably in the pages of that same digest magazine that he first saw the artwork of Virgil Finlay and his personal favourite, Lee Brown Coye. Read More... |
HUGH LAMBEditor Guest of Honour HUGH LAMB was born in 1946 in Sutton, Surrey. One of Britain's most acclaimed anthologists of ghosts and gaslight terrors, he is renowned for unearthing many obscure tales by Victorian and Edwardian writers, including a lost M.R. James story for his 1975 compilation The Thrill of Horror: 22 Terrifying Tales. Read More... |
JO FLETCHERMistress of Ceremonies JO FLETCHER was born in 1958 in West London. An editor, writer, poet and journalist, she has been published widely throughout the world. Her work has appeared in, amongst other titles, The Mammoth Book of Werewolves, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, The Mammoth Book of Dracula, Now We Are Sick, The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers' Dreams, Dark of the Night, White of the Moon, Freaks Geeks and Sideshow Floozies, Cthulhu and the CoEds, Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury and Daughter of Dangerous Dames. As "Featured Poet" she contributed a Zodiac cycle to The Urbanite magazine. Read More... |
JAMES HERBERTSpecial Guest of Honour JAMES HERBERT created the modern mass-market horror genre with the publication of his first ground-breaking novel, The Rats, in 1974 (for the record, Stephen King's Carrie was published a few months later). Since then he has reigned as Britain's undisputed #1 author of chiller fiction, with more than 20 novels to his credit—which have sold more than fifty million copies world-wide. Read More... |
INGRID PITTSpecial Media Guest INGRID PITT is best known to horror film fans as Hammer Film's "Queen of Horror". Her roles in Sound of Horror (aka El sonido la muerte, 1964), The Omegans (1968), The Vampire Lovers (1970), Countess Dracula (1970), The House That Dripped Blood (1970, in an episode based on Robert Bloch's story 'The Cloak'), The Wicker Man (1973), Artemis 81 (1981), Clive Barker's Underworld (aka Transmutations, 1985), Green Fingers (2000), The Asylum (2000, opposite her daughter Steffanie, who plays the lead), Minotaur (2006), Hammer's Beyond the Rave (2008), Sea of Dust (2009) and the 'Vampirology' episode on the Urban Gothic TV series, have established her as an icon in the horror film genre. Her latest credit is a new version of Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart (2009), which marks the last screen appearance of Robert ('Count Yorga') Quarry. Read More... |
BRIAN LUMLEYHWA Lifetime Achievement Award Winner BRIAN LUMLEY was born December 2nd, 1937, just nine months after the most obvious of his forebears—meaning of course a "literary" forebear, namely, H.P. Lovecraft—had departed from it. By his pre-teens Lumley had read Dracula and some other horror classics, but having followed the adventures of Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future in the British Eagle comic, his first love was science fiction. Then, in his early teens—as a result of reading Robert Bloch's Lovecraft pastiche 'Notebook Found in a Deserted House' in a British SF magazine—he became more surely attracted to macabre fiction, an attraction that has lasted a lifetime. Read More... |
DENNIS ETCHISONHWA Special Guest DENNIS ETCHISON lives in Los Angeles, California. He has been called "the most original living horror writer in America" (The Viking-Penguin Encyclopedia) and "the finest writer of psychological horror this genre has produced" (Karl Edward Wagner, Year's Best Horror Stories). His stories have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies since 1961. Read More... |