Alec McQuay
Alec McQuay writes from a series of desks and sofas in Cornwall. Generally known for stories featuring lewd characters, cutting-edge swearing and cutting-edgier violence, he occasionally writes something a little more thoughtful and considered. He can then usually be relied upon to ruin it by dropping in a few naughty words or a damn good stabbing. His works to date have predominantly been for Fox Spirit, including but not limited to the sort-of zombie apocalypse novella Spares and the violent post-apoc sci-fi western thingy Emily Nation. West Cornwall is where genres go to get smooshed together, and then die.
When he isn’t writing he’s usually supposed to be writing, and is probably on Youtube or raiding the fridge. Alec is also a husband, father, architectural ironmonger, shambling karate ogre and drug-free powerlifter, though the day coffee is considered a performance enhancing drug it’s game over, man. Game over.
Berserker, the anticipated sequel to Emily Nation, is due in 2018/19. Actually it was due in 2016/17, but time makes fools of us all.
Tim Major
Tim Major’s love of speculative fiction is the product of a childhood diet of classic Doctor Who episodes and an early encounter with Triffids.
Tim’s SF novel Snakeskins will be published by Titan Books in spring 2019. Other forthcoming books include YA novel Machineries of Mercy (ChiZine), short story collection And the House Lights Dim (Luna Press) and a monograph about the silent crime film, Les Vampires (Electric Dreamhouse Press).
Tim’s earlier novels and novellas include You Don’t Belong Here (Snowbooks), Blighters (Abaddon) and Carus & Mitch (Omnium Gatherum). His short stories have appeared in Interzone, Not One of Us and numerous anthologies, including Best of British Science Fiction 2017 and Best Horror of the Year #10, edited by Ellen Datlow. He is also co-editor of the British Fantasy Society’s fiction journal, BFS Horizons.
Find out more at cosycatastrophes.com
Cheryl Morgan
Cheryl Morgan is a Hugo Award-winning publisher and science fiction & fantasy critic. She started Emerald City, one of the first online science fiction book review zines, in 1995. It won her a Hugo Award in 2004. Three more Hugos followed, including two while working for Clarkesworld Magazine. Cheryl regularly gives lectures and papers on diversity in SF&F, including at the universities of Sussex, Liverpool, Anglia Ruskin, Bristol, La Trobe, and Bologna. In 2017, Cheryl was a member of the jury for the Tiptree Award. In 2018 she will be a keynote speaker at the Worlding SF conference at the University of Graz in Austria. She owns and runs Wizard’s Tower Press http://wizardstowerpress.com. Very occasionally she writes fiction. You can read more about her at Cheryl’s Mewsings https://www.cheryl-morgan.com and follow her on Twitter @CherylMorgan
Yukimi Ogawa
Yukimi Ogawa lives in a small town in Tokyo, Japan, where she writes in English but never speaks the language. She still wonders why it works that way. Her fiction can be found in such places as Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld and Strange Horizons.
Andrew Reid
Born in Scotland, Andrew Reid worked as a research scientist for almost a decade, on projects including DNA synthesis, forensics, and drug development. He now lives in Stockholm. You can find him on Twitter as @mygoditsraining
Steven Savile
Steven Savile has written for Doctor Who, Torchwood, Primeval, Stargate, Warhammer, Slaine, Fireborn, Pathfinder, Arkham Horror, Rogue Angel, and other popular game and comic worlds. He won the International Media Association of Tie-In Writers award for his novel, Shadow of The Jaguar, and the inaugural Lifeboat to the Stars award for Tau Ceti (co-authored with Kevin J. Anderson). Writing as Matt Langley his young adult novel Black Flag was a finalist for the People’s Book Prize 2015. His latest books include Sherlock Holmes and the Murder at Sorrows Crown and Parallel Lines crime novels from Titan, as well as Glass Town and Coldfall Wood from St Martins Press.
Gaie Sebold
Gaie Sebold’s first published book was a poetry collection, Urban Fox (Tall Lighthouse Press, 2001). Her debut novel introduced brothel-owning ex-avatar of sex and war, Babylon Steel (Solaris, 2012); followed by the sequel, Dangerous Gifts. The steampunk fantasy Shanghai Sparrow came out in 2014 and Sparrow Falling in 2016. Her stories have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including the BFS Award shortlisted Fight Like a Girl. She is a freelance copy editor, runs writing workshops, grows vegetables, and is a judge for the 2018 Arthur C Clarke Award.
Her website is www.gaiesebold.com and you can find her on twitter @GaieSebold
Jan Siegel
Jan Siegel was twenty-four when pulled out of the slush pile at Faber for the prestigious Introduction series. Faber wanted her to be a ‘literary’ writer but she was keen to write popular fiction and has published in several genres, under several different names, with several major publishers (eg Hamish Hamilton, Viking Penguin, Little Brown, Century Arrow, Harper Collins). Her fantasy is often bracketed with Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling and her SF has been compared to Stanislaw Lem. As Jemma Harvey, her excursions into romcom (more com than rom) led her to be picked by Heat magazine for their Top Ten Summer Reads. Her poetry has often been incorporated into her novels as part of the world-building process, or just for the fun of it.
She has also worked as a freelance journalist (Independent, Sunday Times, various magazines), focusing mainly on travel writing and specialising in adventure holidays on horseback. More questionable sidelines include reading the Tarot and a recent appearance on a reality TV show.
On twitter as @siegel_jan
Alasdair Stuart
When Alasdair Stuart is not hosting PseudoPod and Escape Pod, or running Escape Artists Inc., he’s professionally enthusiastic about genre fiction on the Internet at places like Tor.com, Barnes & Noble, The Guardian, Uncanny Magazine, SciFi Now and MyMBuzz. He’s an ENie-nominated tabletop RPG writer for his work on Doctor Who: Adventures In Time And Space. His other RPG writing includes Star Trek, The Laundry Files, Primeval, Victoriana, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, N.E.W. and Chill, meaning he’s got a playbook for any variety of invasion you can name.
Alasdair’s first collection of expanded podcast essays, PseudoPod Tapes, is available from Fox Spirit Books with volume 2, Approach With Caution, out in 2018. His short stories can be found in the Fox Pockets anthology series from Fox Spirit, among other places. He lives in the UK with the love of his life and their ever expanding herd of microphones. Follow him on Twitter as @AlasdairStuart, or at his blog, The Man of Words https://alasdairstuart.com
Ian Whates
Ian Whates lives in a sleepy Cambridgeshire village with his partner, Helen, and a manic cocker spaniel called Bundle. A writer and editor of science fiction, fantasy, and occasionally horror, he is the author of seven novels (four space opera and three urban fantasy with steampunk overtones), the co-author of two more (military SF), has seen some seventy of his short stories published in a variety of venues, and has edited around thirty anthologies. His work has been shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award and twice for BSFA Awards. His novel Pelquin’s Comet, first in the Dark Angels sequence, was an Amazon UK #1 best seller, and his work has been translated into Spanish, German, Hungarian, Czech and Greek. His novella The Smallest of Things will appear via PS Publishing, October 2018, while his fourth collection in English, Wourism and Other Stories, is due from Luna Press in 2019. Ian served a term as a director of SFWA (the Science Fiction Writers of America) and is a director of the BSFA (the British Science Fiction Association) an organisation he chaired for five years. In 2006, Ian founded multiple award-winning independent publisher NewCon Press by accident. www.newconpress.co.uk
Aliya Whiteley
Aliya Whiteley was born in Devon in 1974, and currently lives in West Sussex, UK, with her husband, daughter and dog. She writes novels, short stories and non-fiction and has been published in places such as The Guardian, Interzone, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Black Static, Stran
ge Horizons, and anthologies such as Unsung Stories’ 2084 and Lonely Planet›s Better than Fiction I and II. She has been shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award, British Fantasy and British Science Fiction awards, the John W Campbell Award, and a James Tiptree Jr award. Her stories are unpredictable; they can be terrifying, tender, ferocious and deeply funny. She also regularly reviews film, books and television for Den of Geek.
She blogs at: aliyawhiteley.wordpress.com and she tweets most days as @AliyaWhiteley
Nick Wood
Nick Wood is a Zambian born, South African naturalised clinical psychologist, with over twenty short stories previously published in international venues, including AfroSF and AfroSF 2, amongst others. He has a YA speculative fiction book published in South Africa entitled The stone chameleon as well as a debut novel Azanian Bridges, which has been shortlisted for four awards, viz. the Sidewise (Alternative History), Nommos (African), BSFA and John W. Campbell (2016). Nick’s follow up to Azanian Bridges is Water Must Fall, a solar-punk thriller, looking for a home. In a near future, drought and fire devastated Southern Africa and California, new ways of living and loving are sought, in the struggle to survive the squeeze of both climate change and global capitalism. Nick can be found: @nick45wood or http://nickwood.frogwrite.co.nz
Ren Warom
Ren is a writer of the strange, dark and bizarre, repped by Jennifer Udden of Barry Goldblatt Literary LLC. She’s published by Titan Books and Fox Spirit Books and has books forthcoming from both Fox Spirit and Apex.
Twitter: @RenWarom, Facebook: Ren Warom
C.A. Yates
The (not at all) Reverend C.A. Yates is the dynamic yes-all-mens hero of your worst, and possibly dullest, nightmare. Not particularly strident about her political and social mores, she exists purely to kick rote-reeling minds right in their smelly creases. Generally surprising, sometimes a bit leaky, she has been writing for Fox Spirit for a number of years, in which time she has also failed to climb any mountains or search high and low. Don’t even ask her about fording streams. You can find her on Twitter under the sobriquet @shloobee and her website resides at www.chloeyates.com. Most of this is lies. Adjust yourself and wash your bloody hands.
About the Books
Anthologies
Books of Monsters –
Edited by Margrét Helgadóttir
Fox Spirit Books of Monsters is a coffee table book series with 7 books published annually between 2014 and 2020. These books present short stories, graphic stories and art from around the world, continent by continent, written by local authors and based on local folklore, legends and myths. Both African Monsters, Asian Monsters and Pacific Monsters were shortlisted for British Fantasy Awards as Best Anthology (2016, 2017 and 2018). Margret was also awarded with Starburst Magazine’s Brave New Words Award in 2018 for her editor work on Pacific Monsters.
Bushy Tales –
Edited by Adele Wearing
The Bushy Tales series is an exploration of the themes – The Fox & Fae, The Nun & Dragon, The Mouse & Minotaur – covering humour, horror and everything in between.
Eve Series –
Edited by Mhairi Simpson and Darren Pulsford
The Eve series puts women at the forefront – Tales of Eve is fundamentally about women creating their perfect partners, be they man, beast, or washing machine - it really pushed the meaning of love and partnership beyond the realm of mere humans. Eve of War is all about women going to mattresses, what they fight for, what they consider worth fighting for, and how they define victory and defeat.
Fox Pockets –
Edited by Adele Wearing and Darren Pulsford
The Fox Pockets series comprises small but perfectly formed collections of stories by a den full of talented writers, giving the reader bite sized introductions to Fox Spirit and the writers we love to work with. You’ll find stories that wander unfettered between genres; mixing horror, fantasy, science fiction and crime based on the themes – Piracy, Shapeshifters, Guardians, Missing Monarchs, Under the Waves, Things in the Dark, In an Unknown Country, Piercing the Vale, The Evil Genius Guide, and Reflections.
The Girl at the End of the World –
Edited by Adele Wearing
Across two volumes, The Girl at the End of the World offers forty-one striking visions of the apocalypse and the women and girls dealing with it. From gods to zombies, from epic to deeply personal, from the moment of impact to a future where life is long forgotten; bestselling authors and exciting new writers deliver tales you’ll still remember when holed up in a fallout shelter with one remaining bullet and a best friend with a suspicious bite mark on their neck.
The Noir Series –
Edited by K. A. Laity
The Noir Series brings the noir style and tropes to new settings - cross the borders of urban decay and the eldritch in Weird Noir; take a journey into the heart of blackened darkness and see what’s behind the glitz in Noir Carnival; and dance with divas of disguise in the grit and glamour of Drag Noir.
Respectable Horror –
Edited by K.A. Laity
Respectable Horror collects 17 spinetingling stories from writers around the world – tales that will astonish and horrify. They›ll leave you breathless without spilling a drop of blood.
Wicked Women –
Edited by Jenny Barber and Jan Edwards
From thieves and tyrants to witches and warriors, Wicked Women collects tales of women who gleefully write their own rules, who’ll bend or break the social norms, who’ll skate along the edge of the law and generally aim to misbehave.
Winter Tales –
Edited by Margrét Helgadóttir
Winter Tales is a collection of 22 short stories and poems from new and established writers. This anthology celebrates the dark, grim, grotesque but beautiful winter season, through a broad range of speculative genres and themes.
You Left Your Biscuit Behind –
Edited by Adele Wearing
From noir to humour by way of fantasy and a touch of the creepy, this collection of stories explores crime through the lens of multiple genres, all spinning off the prompt – You Left Your Biscuit Behind!
Collections
~Fiction
Always a Dancer & Other Stories by Steve Lockley
A collection of tall tales from author Steve Lockley that ranges from the whimsical to the horrifying, from wistful to chilling. There are dark tales of old rites and all manner of men and beasts to encounter. Featuring some established favourites and some never before released stories collected together for the first time.
Dark Travellings by Ian Whates
A showcase of the darker side of Ian Whates’ imagination, Dark Travellings brings thirteen stories that that will unsettle, delight, and entertain, revealing the best and the worst of humanity: murder, adultery, treachery and depravity, but also compassion, hope, and love.
Dream Book: Unikirja by K.A. Laity
Inspired by Finnish myth and folklore, this collection of K.A. Laity’s stories offers stories where giants sleep, women change shape and music often proves the key to magic. They take place in the distant past or the urban present, but all weave together ancient lore in new ways. Let your dreams soar.
King Wolf & Other Stories by Steven Savile
This collection of linked stories tells how the death of a beloved children’s writer, Hoke Berglund, draws Jon Sieber into a world he cannot hope to understand – a world filled with Hoke’s creations, including the vile Mr. Self Affliction who is the cruel master of this place. In a landscape where angels are beautiful women, and the by-blows of nightmares people the mythical Forgetting Wood, Jon, heir apparent to all that Hoke created, falls for Kristen, the writer’s daughter, but cannot let her secret remain secret.
The Stars Seem So Far Away by Margrét Helgadóttir
The last shuttles to the space colonies are long gone. Wars, famine and plagues rage across the dying Earth. Fleeing the dea
dly sun, humans migrate farther and farther north. Follow the stories of five very different survivors as they cling to what is left of life in a future North.
~Non-Fiction
The Pseudopod Tapes, Volume One
by Alasdair Stuart
Alasdair Stuart, one of the UK’s most knowledgeable and passionate genre journalists, gathers a years’ worth of outro’s from one of the world’s leading horror podcasts and collects them all together for you in this volume of sharp wit, clear insight, tremendous honesty and warm humour.
~Poetry
And the Fox Crows by V.C. Linde
Taking inspiration from the vast wealth of myths, legends and tales about foxes, these poems are a range of humorous, dark, magical and mystical verses framed by Pan, watching over, seeing all, from the ancient past to the immediate present. The fox has inspired art and literature since humans started telling stories. From the Kumiho of Korea to Aesop’s tales. From religion to faith. From hunter to hunted, the fox takes on many forms as do the poems in And The Fox Crows. In turns lyrical and dramatic, playful and sombre, V.C. Linde explores the spirit of the fox through poetry.
Multiverse by Jan Siegel and Guests
Multiverse brings together the poetry of Science Fiction/Fantasy writer Jan Siegel and five other contributors, also best known in other spheres. The poems cover love and death, feminism and eco-issues – legends and libraries, chemo and cake, pirates and paranoia and Paris. They aim to amuse and enchant you, but above all – like the magical forgotten story in Voyage of the Dawn Treader – they are there for the refreshment of the spirit.
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