Tributes have been filling the internet to the British fantasy and dark fiction author Graham Joyce (1954-2014), who died of lymphoma at the young age of 59 after a year’s struggle with the illness. A multiple British Fantasy Award winner, Joyce produced a series of novels and young adult titles over an active career of just over two decades distinguished by its productivity and high quality.
“We are so sorry to have to tell everyone that Graham died this afternoon,” said his official Twitter feed on September 9th, 2014. “He was always so good with words so we don’t know what to say.”
Joyce lived in Leicester and was most recently occupied with teaching creative writing to graduate students at Nottingham Trent University, according to his obituary in Locus Online. He first appeared on the scene with his lucid-dreaming extravaganza Dreamside in 1991, and continued to publish regularly, winning the British Fantasy Award several times as well as the O. Henry Prize. His latest publication and likely his last, barring any posthumous unpublished work, is the 2013 title The Year of the Ladybird, which as with so much of his most characteristic work, weaves often very British realism with subtle and pervasive weird, mystical, and other-worldly elements.
The loving, reverential, and sad accolades from his friends and peers in the fantasy, dark fiction, weird, and supernatural fiction communities appearing all over Facebook and elsewhere are almost too many to count or summarize. Their tone is best captured in io9’s headline for its article on his death: “We’ve Lost One Of The Great Fantasy Writers.”
For Joyce’s reflections on his own fate, see his last blog post here, “A Perfect Day And The Shocking Clarity Of Cancer,” where he writes about the downing of the airliner over Ukraine rather than his own end. “It’s not the diagnosis of cancer that will shock you, though that is enough. It’s the shocking clarity you are left with about life.” Joyce’s life and work were humbling enough: his approach to his death certainly is.
