Graham Joyce

Graham William Joyce
Graham Joyce signing books at Imagicon 2: Swecon 2009
Born	October 22, 1954 Keresley, England
Occupation	Writer and teacher
Genres	Speculative Fiction
Influences Alan Garner, Arthur Machen, J. R. R. Tolkien, Frank Herbert, Mervyn Peake, M. John Harrison, Angela Carter, Ernest Hemingway
www.grahamjoyce.net

Graham Joyce (born October 22, 1954) is an English writer of speculative fiction and the recipient of numerous awards for both his novels and short stories. He grew up in a small mining village just outside of Coventry to a working class family. After receiving a B.Ed. from Bishop Lonsdale College in 1977 and a M.A. from the University of Leicester in 1980. Joyce worked as a youth officer for the National Association of Youth Clubs until 1988. He subsequently quit his position and moved to the Greek islands of Lesbos and Crete to write his first novel, Dreamside. After selling Dreamside to Pan Books in 1991, Joyce moved back to England to pursue a career as a full-time writer.

Presently, Graham Joyce resides in Leicester with his wife, Suzanne Johnsen, and their two children, Ella and Joseph. He teaches Creative Writing to graduate students at Nottingham Trent University.

Style and themes

Both publishers and critics alike have found difficulty in classifying Joyce as a writer. His novels have been categorized as fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mainstream literature—with some even overlapping genres. Joyce utilizes a wide variety of settings and character perspectives. Settings include Scotland, The English Midlands, Greece, the Middle East, and the jungles of Thailand. He has penned for both adult and juvenile protagonists, with an emphasis on strong female characters. The greater unity in Joyce's works, however, lies in their thematic and philosophical topics. Bill Sheehan, who wrote the introduction for Partial Eclipse, states:

“Among the issues Graham dramatizes are the inevitability of grief, loss, growth, and change, the primal importance of family bonds, the beauty of the feminine, the life altering effects of parenthood, the nature of the creative unconscious, the overwhelming power of the erotic, the corrupting effects of power, the importance of self-awareness, and the fundamental need for order, meaning, and coherence in the face of a chaotic, inimical universe.”

The mystical or supernatural often play a pivotal role in Joyce's works. For this, he taps the mythical or folkloric associations of his settings. Joyce's treatment of these experiences is what distinguishes his novels from genre fiction. The supernatural is not seen as a conflict or an obstacle to be overcome, but rather an integral part of a natural order that a character must accept and integrate. Running parallel to these phenomena is the possibility of a rational or psychological explanation. This literary approach is influenced in part by Joyce's experiences with his own family:

“My grandmother was one of these old women who used to have dreams and visions and messages arriving. She would fall asleep in a chair, there would be a knock on the door, she would go to the door, someone strange would come to the door and deliver a message. And then she would wake up again in her chair. Now my mother and my aunties told me these stories over and over again. But they just lived with it side by side. They didn't fight it as in a fantasy or horror film. They didn't have to overcome it. It didn't get worse and worse and worse. They just accepted this mystery and then they cooked the dinner.”

This particular quality has prompted some critics to classify Joyce as a magic realist in the vein of such Latin writers as Gabriel García Márquez or Julio Cortázar. Joyce disagrees with this, feeling that his lineage is tied more closely to writers of the English “weird tale” such as Arthur Machen or Algernon Blackwood. He calls his style of writing “Old Peculiar.”

Film

Currently, there are no films based on Joyce's novels or shorts. However, the film rights to Dreamside, The Tooth Fairy, and Dark Sister have all been optioned. As of October 2010 "Dreamside", "Do the Creepy Thing" (Joyce scripting) and "The Silent Land " (UK publishing date November 17, 2010) are in development.

Games

On January 16, 2009 the site Computer and Video Games reported that Graham Joyce had been hired by id Software to "help develop the storyline potential" of Doom 4.

Bibliography

According to his official site and the Internet Database of Speculative Fiction, Graham Joyce has published fourteen novels and twenty-six short stories to date.

Novels and short story collections

Name	Published	ISBN	Notes
Dreamside	1991	ISBN 978-0-312-87546-6
Dark Sister	1992	ISBN 978-0-312-87254-0	British Fantasy Award winner, 1993
House of Lost Dreams	1993	ISBN 978-0-7472-4248-2
Requiem	1995	ISBN 978-0-312-86452-1	British Fantasy Award winner, 1996; World Fantasy Award nominee, 1996
The Tooth Fairy	1996	ISBN 978-0-312-86833-8	British Fantasy Award winner, 1997
The Stormwatcher	1997	ISBN 978-1-892389-36-7	British Fantasy Award nominee, 1999
The Web: Spiderbite	1997	ISBN 978-1858815275	young adult
Indigo	1999	ISBN 978-0-671-03937-0	British Fantasy Award winner, 2000
Smoking Poppy	2001	ISBN 978-0-671-03939-4	British Fantasy Award nominee, 2002
The Facts of Life	2002	ISBN 978-0-7434-6342-3	World Fantasy Award winner, 2003; British Fantasy Award nominee, 2003
Partial Eclipse and Other Stories	2003	ISBN 978-1-931081-62-7	collection
The Limits of Enchantment	2005	ISBN 978-0-7434-6344-7	World Fantasy Award nominee, 2006
TWOC	2005	ISBN 978-0-571-22513-2	young adult Angus Award "winner"
Do the Creepy Thing	2006	ISBN 978-0-571-23035-8	young adult; released in the US as The Exchange (2008) ISBN 978-0-670-06207-2
Three Ways to Snog an Alien	2008	ISBN 978-0-571-23951-1	young adult
Memoirs of a Master Forger	2008	ISBN 978-0-575-08297-7	as William Heaney; released in the US as How to Make Friends with Demons (2009) ISBN 978-1-59780-142-3 British Fantasy Award winner
The Devil's Ladder	2009	ISBN 978-0-571-24247-4	young adult
The Silent Land	2011	ISBN 978-0-385-53380-5	World Fantasy Award nominee, 2011; British Fantasy Award nominee, 2011

Short stories

• Monastic Lives (1992)
• The Careperson (1992)
• Last Rising Sun (1992)
• The Ventriloquial Art (1993)
• The Apprentice (1993)
• Under the Pylon (1993)
• Gap-Sickness (1993)
• Eat Reecebread (1994) with Peter F. Hamilton
• The Reckoning (1994)
• Black Ball Game (1995)
• A Tip from Bobby Moore (1996)
• The White Stuff (1997) with Peter F. Hamilton
• Pinkland (1997)
• The Mountain Eats People (1998)
• As Seen on Radio (1998)
• Leningrad Nights (1999)
• Candia (1999)
• Incident in Mombassa (1999)
• Horrograph (1999)
• Partial Eclipse (2000)
• Xenos Beach (2000)
• Coventry Boy (2001)
• Leningrad Nights (2002)
• The Coventry Boy (2002)
• First, Catch Your Demon (2002)
• Black Dust (2002)
• An Ordinary Soldier of the Queen (2009)

Articles

• Working Class Monster (June 2000)
• Greek Virtues
• The Great God Pan
• Two weeks, three couples and six kids equals hell

External links

• Author's Official Website
• Literature Map of Joyce
• Simon & Schuster Profile Page
• Profile at Fantastic Fiction
• Interview at Actusf
• August 2007 interview. Located under "Fiction"
• Graham Joyce at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Graham Joyce at Worlds Without End