Graham Joyce books in order

Graham Joyce (1954-2014) was an English writer of speculative fiction whose novels, including The Tooth Fairy (1996), The Facts of Life (2002) and Some Kind of Fairy Tale (2012), won the World Fantasy Award and several British Fantasy Awards.

Born on 22 October 1954 and raised in Keresley, a mining village near Coventry, Joyce trained as a teacher at Bishop Lonsdale College, took an MA at the University of Leicester in 1980 and worked as a youth officer until 1988. He then moved to the Greek islands of Lesbos and Crete, where he wrote his first novel, Dreamside, which Pan Books bought and published in 1991. Back in England he wrote steadily, publishing Dark Sister (1992), Requiem, The Tooth Fairy, The Facts of Life, which won the World Fantasy Award, Memoirs of a Master Forger under the name William Heaney, Some Kind of Fairy Tale and The Year of the Ladybird (2013), later issued as The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit. He also won an O. Henry Award for short fiction. He described his blend of the everyday and the uncanny as "Old Peculiar", tracing it to English weird writers such as Arthur Machen. He taught creative writing at Nottingham Trent University from 1996, kept goal for the England Writers football team, and died of lymphoma on 9 September 2014, a year after his diagnosis.

For collectors

Some Kind of Fairy Tale had a limited first edition of 1,500 copies, signed by Joyce and published in June 2012 with an extra short story, "The Oversoul"; the novel went on to win the British Fantasy Society's Robert Holdstock Award in 2013. Black Gate lists his British Fantasy Award-winning novels as Requiem, The Tooth Fairy, The Stormwatcher, How to Make Friends with Demons and Some Kind of Fairy Tale.