The British Fantasy Awards were announced over the weekend in Nottingham at the annual Fantasycon, with the Sydney J Bounds Best Newcomer Award going to Joe Hill, who brought us one of the first novels to impress me this year, Heart Shaped Box, a superbly creepy and atmospheric ghost story, the type that makes you jump out of your skin if you hear a sudden noise in the middle of the night. And kudos to him not only for a great debut novel and a well deserved win but for trying to keep his familial connection to the god of modern horror writing Stephen King (he’s King’s son) secret so his work would be taken on its own (very splendid) merits. I’m not surprised to see him winning a gong here because I can honestly see Heart Shaped Box ending up on my favourite books of the year list.
Other winners included Tim Lebbon for the genuinely disturbing and engrossing horror-fantasy Dusk (why oh why does this series not have a UK publisher yet? I thought it was brilliant and quite different from a lot of other fantasy series. Come on SF&F publishers, shove a contract under Tim’s nose, please!), Neil Gaiman for the Fragile Things collection, Mark Chadbourn for Whisper Lane (not content with being a fine novelist and now comics scribe he’s picking up more awards for his short fiction) and Peter Crowther’s PS Publishing, a gem of an Indy SF&F small press; Ariel has the full details over on the UKSF Book News.
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September 25th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
[...] There appears to be plenty of happiness going on around the blogosphere about these results. We have comment from Jeff VanderMeer and Joe Gordon. And a well-earned bit of celebration from PS Publishing, Ellen Datlow and Tim Lebbon. [...]