The Convention regrets that Life Achievement recipient Ramsey Campbell will not be able to attend the Convention. He has been advised by his medical team to cancel since his recovery from an earlier problem will not allow him to travel. Ramsey Campbell

Photo © Ramsey Campbell

Ramsey Campbell was born in 1946 in Liverpool, UK. He is an English horror fiction writer, editor and critic who has been writing for well over fifty years. Two of his novels have been filmed, both for non-English-speaking markets. Campbell first encountered H.P. Lovecraft at age eight (1954), via the story "The Colour Out of Space" which he found in the Groff Conklin anthology Strange Travels in Science Fiction. On leaving school at age sixteen, Campbell went to work in the Inland Revenue as a tax officer (1962–66). He sold various of his early stories to editors including August Derleth and Robert A.W. Lowndes. In December 1961 Campbell completed the story "The Church in High Street" which appeared in the anthology, Dark Mind, Dark Heart. Campbell's first collection, The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (Arkham House,1964) was published when he was but eighteen years old and collects his Lovecraftian pastiches to that date. Averaging about a novel a year, three of them have won major awards. He has also published four short story collections since 2000, one of which won Best Collection. Campbell also contributed numerous articles on horror cinema to The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (1986). He reviewed films and DVDs weekly for BBC Radio Merseyside until 2007. He has also edited a number of anthologies, including New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1980), New Terrors and New Terrors II and (with Stephen Jones) the first five volumes of the annual Best New Horror series (1990–1994). Ramsey Campbell, Probably, a collection of Campbell's book reviews, film reviews, autobiographical writings and other nonfiction, was published in 2002. Recently, Ramsey Campbell was made a Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for "outstanding services to literature." Ramsey Campbell married Jenny Chandler, daughter of A. Bertram Chandler, and they still lives on Merseyside. You can find out more by visiting www.ramseycampbell.com

Source: Wikipedia

Sheri S. Tepper

Photo © Sheri S. Tepper

Sheri S. Tepper was born Shirley Stewart Douglas in 1929, near Littleton, Colorado. She married for the first time at age 20, then divorced several years later and 'became a single mother of two kids.' She worked at a variety of jobs including one with international relief agency CARE, but her principal career was with what was then called Rocky Mountain Planned Parenthood working for 24 years, eventually becoming Executive Director. She married Gene Tepper in the late '60s. She runs a guest ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The first fantasy novel she wrote was The Revenants, but it was thought to be too complicated for a first novel, so she quickly wrote the True Game books (King's Blood Four and Necromancer Nine (both 1983), and Wizard's Eleven (1984). Other books followed, featuring Jinian, Marianne, and Mavin Manyshaped, along with a few standalone books—including The Revenants (1984) and After Long Silence (1987). After retiring to become a full-time writer, she produced a SF novel The Awakeners (1987, originally published as two volumes: Northshore and Southshore), The Gate to Women's Country (1988), and Grass (1989). Later novels include Raising the Stones (1991), Beauty (1991, winner of the 1992 Locus Award for Best Fantasy), A Plague of Angels (1993), Gibbon's Decline and Fall (1996), The Family Tree (1997), and Six Moon Dance (1998). She has also written horror as E.E. Horlak, and mysteries under the pseudonyms A.J. Orde and B.J. Oliphant. You can find out more by visiting sheri-s-tepper.com.

Source: Wikipedia