BIO: Jo Fletcher lives in northeast London, England. She is founder and publisher of Jo Fletcher Books, UK publisher Quercus’ specialist horror, fantasy, and science fiction imprint. She is also a writer, ghost-writer, and occasional poet, following earlier careers as a local, then Fleet Street journalist (once commended by a High Court judge for helping stop a bomber), and a film and book critic. She’s been published widely, both in and out of horror, fantasy & SF, winning awards for her writing and services to the genre, including the World Fantasy, the British Fantasy Society’s August Derleth and the International Society of Poets Awards.
Jo’s publishing career began in the late 1970s, when she began co-running the British Fantasy Society, and was a regular contributor to Science Fiction Chronicle, amongst other periodicals. She was one of the founder members of the Horror Writers’ Association, and has been a Trustee, sits on the Board of World Fantasy Convention, and is a member of the World Fantasy Awards Administration. Jo co-chaired several British FantasyCons, as well as the 1988 and 1997 World Fantasy Conventions in London.
Jo’s publishing career started in 1985 when she joined the brand-new indie publisher Headline, introducing horror greats like Charles L. Grant, Chet Williamson and Dan Simmons to the British reading public. A short stint at Mandarin (Hamlyn) – and a chance to republish the entire Dennis Wheatley oeuvre – was followed by several years at the newly revitalised genre list at Pan Macmillan, where her authors included Charles de Lint, Richard Christian Matheson and Graham Joyce, as well as Dark Voices: The Pan Book of Horror anthology series. After a short stint at Penguin, working on the brief-lived horror imprint Signet, she moved to Gollancz, then an independent publisher, to run the genre list there, and stayed as it became part of the Hachette UK empire under Orion. As well as founding the Fantasy Masterworks list to sit alongside the SF Masterworks, her authors ranged from old masters like H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard to bestselling and award-winning masters like Terry Pratchett, Ursula K. Le Guin, Andrzej Sapkowski and Charlaine Harris, to new discoveries like Joe Hill, Tom Lloyd and Ben Aaronovitch, as well as the award-winning Dark Terrors series.
In 2011 Quercus, then a young independent publisher, lured her away to start Jo Fletcher Books; JFB returned to the Hachette stable in 2014 when Hodder acquired Quercus. JFB continues Jo’s tradition of publishing some of the very best writers in the interconnected fields of horror, fantasy and SF. Current authors range widely across the field, from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Alison Littlewood and Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, to newcomers like Ry Herman and Breanna Teintze.
In her rare spare time, Jo sings, mostly classical choral music, gardens, watches birds, and cooks.
The HWA is proud to announce our Lifetime Achievement Award winners: Jo Fletcher, Nancy Holder, and Koji Suzuki. Their awards will be given at this year’s StokerCon, happening in Denver, Colorado in May.
The Lifetime Achievement Award is presented periodically to an individual whose work has substantially influenced the horror genre. While this award is often presented to a writer, it may also be given for influential accomplishments in other creative fields.
The Lifetime Achievement Award is the most prestigious of all awards presented by HWA. It does not merely honor the superior achievement embodied in a single work. Instead, it is an acknowledgment of superior achievement in an entire career.
Congratulations to this year’s recipients!
Jo Fletcher
Jo Fletcher lives in northeast London, England. She is founder and publisher of Jo Fletcher Books, UK publisher Quercus’ specialist horror, fantasy, and science fiction imprint. She is also a writer, ghost-writer, and occasional poet, following earlier careers as a local, then Fleet Street journalist (once commended by a High Court judge for helping stop a bomber), and a film and book critic. She’s been published widely, both in and out of horror, fantasy & SF, winning awards for her writing and services to the genre, including the World Fantasy, the British Fantasy Society’s August Derleth and the International Society of Poets Awards.
Jo’s publishing career began in the late 1970s, when she began co-running the British Fantasy Society, and was a regular contributor to Science Fiction Chronicle, amongst other periodicals. She was one of the founder members of the Horror Writers’ Association, and has been a Trustee, sits on the Board of World Fantasy Convention, and is a member of the World Fantasy Awards Administration. Jo co-chaired several British FantasyCons, as well as the 1988 and 1997 World Fantasy Conventions in London.
Jo’s publishing career started in 1985 when she joined the brand-new indie publisher Headline, introducing horror greats like Charles L. Grant, Chet Williamson and Dan Simmons to the British reading public. A short stint at Mandarin (Hamlyn) – and a chance to republish the entire Dennis Wheatley oeuvre – was followed by several years at the newly revitalised genre list at Pan Macmillan, where her authors included Charles de Lint, Richard Christian Matheson and Graham Joyce, as well as Dark Voices: The Pan Book of Horror anthology series. After a short stint at Penguin, working on the brief-lived horror imprint Signet, she moved to Gollancz, then an independent publisher, to run the genre list there, and stayed as it became part of the Hachette UK empire under Orion. As well as founding the Fantasy Masterworks list to sit alongside the SF Masterworks, her authors ranged from old masters like H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard to bestselling and award-winning masters like Terry Pratchett, Ursula K. Le Guin, Andrzej Sapkowski and Charlaine Harris, to new discoveries like Joe Hill, Tom Lloyd and Ben Aaronovitch, as well as the award-winning Dark Terrors series.
In 2011 Quercus, then a young independent publisher, lured her away to start Jo Fletcher Books; JFB returned to the Hachette stable in 2014 when Hodder acquired Quercus. JFB continues Jo’s tradition of publishing some of the very best writers in the interconnected fields of horror, fantasy and SF. Current authors range widely across the field, from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Alison Littlewood and Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, to newcomers like Ry Herman and Breanna Teintze.
In her rare spare time, Jo sings, mostly classical choral music, gardens, watches birds, and cooks.
New York Times bestselling author Nancy Holder was born in Palo Alto, California. A Navy brat, she went to middle school in Japan. When she was sixteen, she dropped out of high school to become a ballet dancer in Cologne, Germany. An injury at eighteen ended that possible career.
Eventually she returned to California and graduated from the University of California at San Diego with a degree in Communications. Soon after, she began to write; her first sale was a young adult novel with the unfortunate title of Teach Me to Love. Thus she is the Kilgore Trout of the romance world.
Nancy’s work has appeared on many bestseller lists. A six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, she received a Scribe Award from the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers for Best Novel, and was subsequently named a Grand Master by that organization in 2019. She also received a Young Adult Literature Pioneer Award from RT Booksellers.
She and Debbie Viguié co-authored the New York Times bestselling Wicked series for Simon and Schuster; they produced many more books together, including the teen thriller The Rules. She wrote horror solo and with Melanie Tem for Dell Abyss, and is the author of the young adult horror series, Possessions, for Razorbill. She has sold many projects set in universes such as Teen Wolf, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Saving Grace, Hellboy, Smallville, Wishbone, Kolchak the Night Stalker, the Green Hornet, Domino Lady, and Zorro. She novelized the movies Ghostbusters, Wonder Woman, and Crimson Peak. She has also sold approximately two hundred short stories as well as essays on writing, popular culture and horror.
A Baker Street Irregular, she co-edited Sherlock Holmes of Baking Street (with Margie Deck), and has written pastiches, articles, and essays about Holmes for various journals and books. She and Deck are the Co-commissioners for an ongoing projected seven-year project annotation project of the original manuscript of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle short story, “The Terror of Blue John Gap,” for the Arthur Conan Doyle Society.
She is an editor and writer of pulp fiction for Moonstone, where she and her writing partner, Alan Philipson, are working on a series of prose stories and comic book/graphic novel series of their creator-owned character, Johnny Fade in Deadtown. A second creator-owned series is underway with another publisher.
She lives in a small town Washington state with her family, and they are ruled over by a ferocious Corgi named Tater. Find her at her outdated website nancyholder.com, @nancyholder, and facebook.com/holder.nancy.
Koji Suzuki
Koji Suzuki is a Japanese writer, who was born in Hamamatsu and lives in Tokyo. Suzuki is the author of the Ring novels, which have been adapted into other formats, including films, manga, TV series and video games. He has written several books on the subject of fatherhood.
HWA’s Lifetime Achievement Award Committee has chosen three extraordinary recipients for 2020:
CAROL J. CLOVER is a Professor Emerita of Medieval Studies (Early Northern Europe) and American Film at the University of California, Berkeley. While much of her scholarship has concerned medieval Icelandic culture, her 1992 book Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film was a seminal work in the serious study of contemporary horror cinema and especially “slasher” films. Clover argued against film critics who saw the films as victimizing women, instead focusing on the victim/hero – the young woman who defeats the killer. Clover coined the term “final girl,” and articulated a structural and gendered approach to understanding films such as Friday the 13th, Halloween, and similar horror cinema that has exhibited a profound effect not only on how scholars understand the genre, but also has entered the popular vocabulary and understanding of how to read these films. The volume reissued as a “Princeton Classic” in 2015 and her influence in the genre can be seen in such recent horror narratives as Final Girl, The Final Girls, Scream Queens, and every rebooted slasher film of the last twenty years.
JEWELLE GOMEZ is a writer, novelist, playwright, activist, critic, poet, and television writer, among many other identities and activities. She is the author of seven books including the double Lambda Literary Award-winning vampire novel The Gilda Stories, currently celebrating its 30th year in print. She also authored the stage adaptation of that novel under the title Bones and Ash: A Gilda Story, which began touring in 1996 and was performed in thirteen American cities by the Urban Bush Women company. Her work centers on women’s stories, in particular women of color, and LGBTQ+ rights and culture. Gomez calls herself “the possible foremother of Afrofuturism.” Her poems and short stories appear in over one hundred anthologies. She has also worked as a critic for The Village Voice. Her work bringing horror and speculative fiction from a lesbian feminist perspective is found not only in her own writing, but in her activism, her teaching, her lectures, and her mentoring. Her impact on the field is substantial, and her work has expanded the margins of horror in an inclusive and genre-reshaping fashion.
MARGE SIMON‘s poems, short fiction, and illustrations have appeared in hundreds of publications, including Amazing Stories, ChiZine, Daily Science Fiction, Dream & Nightmares, Niteblade, The Pedestal Magazine, Strange Horizons, Vestal Review, and many, many more. She has published over a dozen books of poetry and short fiction and won three Bram Stoker Awards for Best Poetry Collection for Vectors: A Week in the Death of a Planet (2007, co-written with Charlee Jacob), Vampires, Zombies & Wanton Souls (2012, illustrated by Sandy DeLuca) and Four Elements (2013, co-written with Rain Graves, Charlee Jacob and Linda Addison). Simon’s service to the profession is incalculable, including mentoring numerous poets and writers, serving as the president of both the Small Press Writers and Artists Organization and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association, as well as serving as Chair for the HWA Board of Trustees. She has also illustrated five Bram Stoker Award-winning collections and has worked collaboratively with a number of different authors. Simon is the second woman to be acknowledged by the SF&F Poetry Association with a Grand Master Award.
The
HORROR WRITERS ASSOCIATION is delighted to announce the recipients of
this year’s Lifetime Achievement Awards, presented in alphabetical
order: Owl Goingback and Thomas Ligotti. The award will be given during
this year’s Bram Stoker Awards ceremony, taking place at Stokercon in
Scarborough U.K. from April 16 through April 19, 2020.
HWA, the
premier organization of writers and publishers of horror and dark
fantasy and home of the iconic Bram Stoker Awards®, presents the
Lifetime Achievement Award annually to individuals whose work has
substantially influenced the horror and dark fantasy genres. While the
award is often presented to a writer, it may also be given to an
individual for influential accomplishments in other creative fields. HWA
employs a hard-working committee for the selection process and
recipients are chosen through stringent criteria. When more than one
award winner is determined, the rules require a unanimous vote from all
committee members. Thus, the winners were recognized as highly deserving
individuals for their work in the horror and dark fantasy field.
OWL GOINGBACK:
“I grew up an only child in the rural Midwest. I would probably have gone stark raving mad of boredom, especially during the harsh winter months, if I hadn’t been kept entertained by horror fiction and Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. I owe a lot to Poe, Lovecraft, Bradbury, Forry Ackerman, and many modern scribes of dark fiction for helping me keep my sanity during those years, and I wanted to give something back to the genre by writing horror fiction of my own. I am deeply honored that the Horror Writers Association has named me a Lifetime Achievement Award winner, and eternally thankful that my works of fiction are being read and enjoyed by at least a few people.”
THOMAS LIGOTTI:
“Being chosen to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association is a good in itself. In a strange way it is also frightening. If you’re anything like me—and if you are, then you have my condolences—there’s an element of the uncanny to it, as if it were one of those things that happens only to other people. In summary, I accept this honor as a token that my labors were appreciated by others with whom I share a peculiar likeness.
I’ve been a member of the HWA off and on since the beginning, and the last time I joined was around the time that Rocky was president and in the sad process of selling off his Stephen King collection to deal with the progression of the ALS that affected his ability to physically function and then cruelly murdered him. I have a reputation for the pessimism that’s so conspicuous in my fiction and was the basis of my nonfiction title The Conspiracy against the Human Race. The origins of that pessimism are somewhat various, but perhaps the major reason is the suffering that life visits on people like Rocky Wood. I’m not bothered by criticism of my grim view of life, which is usually doled out by reviewers who seemingly haven’t experienced real suffering—or perhaps lack the imagination and compassion to appreciate the suffering of others—and believe that I’m an advocate for suicide. What I am is someone who’s pro-choice when it comes to both suicide and abortion, though I don’t think I can be accused of promoting the former, if only because it is invariably problematic in its methods. If anything, I’m an advocate of doctor-assisted euthanasia as for those who desire it, because for so many this option alleviates the fear of being abandoned to depend on their own devices, completely alone in the most profound sense of the word, and perhaps even unable to successfully escape the pain that has driven them to seek a way out of a world that’s going to evict us all at some point anyway. Undoubtedly, what I’ve found most gratifying in my writing life has been hearing from readers who express sincere gratitude to me for expressing a worldview they believed themselves to be alone in discerning and even embracing. Any number of writers might have provided them with the same consolation, but because their reading was focused on horror fiction I was the one who served as someone who assured them they were not isolated in how they thought and felt. This is how it was for me when I discovered Lovecraft, if only because his works most overtly and intensely confirmed, to reference H. P. Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu, that I wasn’t the only one to conceive and experience “terrifying vistas of reality,” which began in earnest during my teens. Since the advent of email, I’ve been amazed at how many readers and writers of supernatural horror fiction with whom I’ve communicated have lived with some type of emotional affliction. I’d like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation for the section on the HWA website that compiles some documentation on this observation in the form of essays and interviews on this subject.”
BIOGRAPHIES
OWL GOINGBACK
Having served as a jet engine mechanic in the Air Force, and the former owner of a restaurant and lounge, Owl Goingback became a full time writer in 1987. He has written numerous novels, children’s books, short stories, and magazine articles. His novel Crota won the 1996 Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel, and was one of four finalists in the Best Novel category. The Bram Stoker Awards are given annually by voting members of the Horror Writers Association and are considered the highest honor a writer can receive in the horror genre. Owl’s novel Shaman Moon was published by White Wolf Publishing as part of the omnibus edition The Essential World of Darkness. The book draws on his Native American heritage to tell a story of supernatural suspense, as do his other novels Darker than Night and Evil Whispers. He has also ghostwritten novels for celebrities.
His children’s books Eagle Feathers and The Gift have received critical acclaim from both parents and teachers. Eagle Feathers is a Storytelling World Awards Honor Recipient. The award was presented at the 1998 Annual National Convention of the International Reading Association. Goingback’s shorter works of fiction have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Tales from the Great Turtle, Confederacy of the Dead, Phantoms of the Night, Excalibur, The Book of Kings, When Will You Rage?, Once Upon a Midnight, Quest to Riverworld, Grails: Visitations of the Night, and South from Midnight. His story “Grass Dancer” was a Nebula Award Nominee for best short story of the year. In addition to his writing, he has lectured throughout the country on the customs and folklore of the American Indians. He has also modeled and done a bit of acting. The author resides in Florida with his wife and two sons.
THOMAS LIGOTTI
Thomas Ligotti was born in Detroit in 1953. Among the most acclaimed horror writers of the past thirty years, he has received three Bram Stoker Awards, a British Fantasy Award, and an International Horror Guild Award. He lives in South Florida. Thomas Ligotti’s debut collection, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and his second, Grimscribe, permanently inscribed a new name in the pantheon of horror fiction. Influenced by the strange terrors of Lovecraft and Poe and by the brutal absurdity of Kafka, Ligotti eschews cheap, gory thrills for his own brand of horror, which shocks at the deepest, existential, levels.
Ligotti’s
stories take on decaying cities and lurid dreamscapes in a style
ranging from rich, ornamental prose to cold, clinical detachment. His
raw and experimental work lays bare the unimportance of our world and
the sickening madness of the human condition. Like the greatest writers
of cosmic horror, Ligotti bends reality until it cracks, opening
fissures through which he invites us to gaze on the unsettling darkness
of the abyss below.
For more information about the Lifetime Achievement Award and the Bram Stoker Awards, please visit:
