WIC 2010 Keynote : The End Of The Print Age
This is the twilight of the printed book. As surely as we moved from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age we find ourselves in a transition from the Print Age to the Digital Age. What does this mean for the writer who “merely” wants to write? The complexities of publishing have suddenly been multiplied in a way that challenges every writer who ever had an ambition to publish or make a single penny from the business of writing. But far from being a calamity, the onslaught of digital technologies has opened up new opportunities for the industrious writer who is able to diversify.
Keynote speaker : Graham Joyce
Graham Joyce is the author of seventeen novels and numerous short stories, which have won five British Fantasy Awards, the World Fantasy Award in 2003 and the prestigious O Henry prize in 2009. He grew up in a small mining village just outside Coventry in a working class family and wrote his first novel Dreamside on the Greek island of Lesbos, where he lived for three years after leaving his job to concentrate on writing. After selling Dreamside to Pan Books in 1991, Graham moved back to England to pursue a career as a full-time writer.
Graham’s writing has been classified as fantasy, horror, science fiction and mainstream literature. His stories frequently return to themes of grief, loss, growth and change, 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 universe. While the literary quality of his writing has prompted comparisons with magical realism, Graham himself places it in the tradition of the English ‘weird tales’ and writers including Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood.
Graham recently collected his memoirs as a goalkeeper in the non-fiction Simple Goalkeeping Made Easy which was nominated for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2009. He has also diversified into new media with the announcement last year that he would be writing the story for the latest in the phenomenally popular series of Doom video games. Graham teaches fiction and creative writing at Nottingham Trent University, and is well known for his insightful creative writing workshops and seminars.
