The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories
Page 40
José María Latorre was born in Zaragoza in 1945. He was a celebrated film critic in his native Spain as well as a prolific author of some thirty books and an award-winning screenwriter. His best macabre stories have been collected in La noche de Cagliostro y otros relatos de terror [Cagliostro’s Night and Other Tales of Terror] (2006) and Música muerta y otros relatos [Dead Music and Other Tales] (2014). He died in 2014.
Luigi Musolino was born in 1982 in Torino, Italy, where he still lives and works. A specialist in Italian folklore, he is the author of several collections of short stories in the areas of weird fiction, horror, and rural Gothic: Bialere (2012), Oscure Regioni [Dark Regions] (2 vols., 2014-15), and Uironda (2018). In 2019 his first novel, Eredità di carne [Legacy of Flesh] appeared. He has translated into Italian works by Brian Keene, Lisa Mannetti, Michael Laimo, and the autobiographical writings of H. P. Lovecraft. His stories have been published in Italy, the United States, Ireland, and South Africa.
Pilar Pedraza has combined a career as a professor at the University of Valencia with a prolific writing career, producing an extensive body of work that includes stories, novels, columns, articles, and essays. As a fiction writer, she is the author of many novels and story collections, including La fase del rubí, La pequeña pasión, Arcano trece, La perra de Alejandría, and El amante germano. As a researcher, she has devoted various essays to cinema (Metropolis, Cat People, Federico Fellini, Agustí Villaronga and Jean Cocteau) and to the construction of the feminine in literature and cinema of the fantastic, with works such as Máquinas de amar and Espectra. She has received many awards throughout her career, including the Ignotus, Nocte, Sheridan Le Fanu, Gabriel, and Celsius Awards.
Michael Roch is a science fiction writer and scriptwriter born in 1987 in France. His first fantastic and horrific short stories were published in various underground fanzines before joining Walrus Editions with two science fiction novels: Twelve and Mortal Derby X. His novel Moi, Peter Pan (MU Editions, 2017), was longlisted for the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire in 2018. Since he returned to his native West Indies in 2015, he has conducted several creative writing workshops on the theme of Afrofuturism – a literary movement developing afrocentered counter-dystopias – in prison and university environments. His latest novel, Le livre jaune [The Yellow Book], at the crossroads of Lovecraftian influences and the Astroblackness movement, is published by MU Editions (2019).
Solange Rodríguez Pappe was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador in 1976. With seven volumes of fiction to her credit, she explores the genres of weird and fantastic fiction, horror, and science fiction. She has won the Joaquín Gallegos Lara Prize for best story collection in 2010 (for Balas perdidas [Lost Bullets]) and 2019 (La primera vez que vi un fantasma [The First Time I Saw a Ghost]). She has worked as a Professor of Literary Arts and a coordinator of creative writing workshops since 2005. In 2014 she earned her MA with a study on Latin American apocalyptic literature and the possible destruction of her city. Her predictions are starting to come true.
Elisenda Solsona (Olesa de Montserrat, 1984) is a writer and secondary school teacher. She has a degree in Humanities and Audiovisual Communication and a master’s in Film Writing. She has published the collection of flash fiction, Cirurgies [Surgeries] (Voliana Editions, 2016) and a volume of short stories, Satèl·lits [Satellites] (Editorial Males Herbes, 2019). The latter book was a substantial success in Catalonia and won the Premi Imperdible for best Catalan book in the realm of fantastic literature.
Frithjof Spalder was born in 1933, the son of a well-known Norwegian composer of the same name. He is the author of a collection of macabre tales, Jernjomfruen [The Iron Maiden] (1971) and a novel, Dødningerittet (1976) and has also translated books from English to Norwegian and worked as an animator. He is a trained designer and illustrator in black & white, watercolor, airbrush, and acrylic. He lives in Oslo.
Martin Steyn fell in love with words when he discovered Stephen King, and it wasn’t long before he took up a pencil and wrote a horror story of his own. Serial killers would later seduce him into crime and, armed with degrees in Psychology and Criminology, he’s been writing police procedurals and psychological thrillers set in Cape Town, South Africa, the first published in 2014. But the short story still holds a special place in his heart and every year a few appear in local magazines. Whenever he can get away with it, he slips a bit of horror in as well.
Yvette Tan is one of the Philippines’ most celebrated horror writers. Works in the genre include two collections, one in English and the other in Tagalog, and a full-length film. She’s written for TV, magazines, and the web, and is currently agriculture editor of one of the Philippines’ leading newspapers. She’s commonly asked how horror is related to agriculture, and her answer is that they both involve keeping the apocalypse at bay.
Bathie Ngoye Thiam was born and raised in Baol (Senegal). He has lived for many years in Europe but remains attached to his country of birth. An architect by training, he expresses himself more through painting, writing, and on stage as an actor or storyteller. He has published two novels, a volume of plays, and a collection of fantastic tales based in part on Senegalese folklore.
Tanya Tynjäla was born in 1963 in Callao, Peru. She is the author of five books in the genres of fantasy and science fiction and is also a freelance journalist and a teacher of French and Spanish. Her short stories have been widely anthologized internationally, including in Argentina, Spain, Bulgaria, and Finland, among other places. She lives in Finland.
Attila Veres (b. 1985) is a Hungarian writer of horror and weird fiction. His first novel Odakint sötétebb [Darker Outside] (2017) was a surprise success in his native country, and was followed by the story collection Éjféli iskolák [Midnight Schools] (2018). His fiction appears regularly in Black Aether, a magazine dedicated to Hungarian cosmic horror, as well as in literary magazines. As a screenwriter he has written several short and feature length films all over Europe, and he won the Best Television Screenplay award at the 2020 Hungarian Film Awards for the TV feature Lives Recurring. He is originally from Nyíregyháza but currently lives in Budapest. ‘The Time Remaining’ is his first English publication.