Simon Strantzas

Last updated
Simon Strantzas
Simon Strantzas at Necronomicon PVD 2019.jpg
Photo of Simon Strantzas in 2019
Born1972
Toronto, Canada
OccupationWriter, editor
Genre Weird
Horror
Website
strantzas.com

Simon Strantzas (born 1972) is a weird fiction author from Toronto, Canada. He has written five story collections and been nominated for a British Fantasy Award in 2009. [1] He has also edited three anthologies including Aickman's Heirs which won two Shirley Jackson Awards in 2015, one for best Edited Anthology and one for the included story “The Dying Season” by Lynda E. Rucker. [2] His work was also cited as an influence for Nic Pizzolatto, creator of True Detective . [3]

Contents

In March 2015, Simon Strantzas was selected as co-editor of The Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 3 (2016). [4]

Burnt Black Suns

In May 2014, Simon Strantzas released his fourth weird fiction collection from Hippocampus Press. It contained nine stories with two novellas and seven short stories. S. T. Joshi called it "one of the best weird collections [he’s] ever read—at least in the last 20 years and maybe longer than that." [5] In May 2015, Burnt Black Suns was nominated for the 2014 Shirley Jackson Award for Single-Author Collection. [6]

Aickman's Heirs

In May 2015, Undertow Publications released Aickman's Heirs, an anthology edited by Simon Strantzas. The short fiction stories in the anthology were written by some of the leading voices in strange fiction, including Brian Evenson and Lisa Tuttle, as a showcase of how Robert Aickman's work continues to inspire contemporary authors. The anthology was nominated for the British Fantasy Award and the World Fantasy Award. It was also the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, as was Lynda E. Rucker's "The Dying Season". Rucker's story and Nadia Bulkin's also-nominated "Seven Minutes in Heaven" were both stories from the book.

Bibliography

Collections

Anthologies edited

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William F. Nolan</span> American writer (1928–2021)

William Francis Nolan was an American author who wrote hundreds of stories in the science fiction, fantasy, horror, and crime fiction genres.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ramsey Campbell</span> English author

Ramsey Campbell is an English horror fiction writer, editor and critic who has been writing for well over fifty years. He is the author of over 30 novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them winners of literary awards. Three of his novels have been adapted into films.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeff VanderMeer</span> American writer (born 1968)

Jeff VanderMeer is an American author, editor, and literary critic. Initially associated with the New Weird literary genre, VanderMeer crossed over into mainstream success with his bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy. The trilogy's first novel, Annihilation, won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards, and was adapted into a Hollywood film by director Alex Garland. Among VanderMeer's other novels are Shriek: An Afterword and Borne. He has also edited with his wife Ann VanderMeer such influential and award-winning anthologies as The New Weird, The Weird, and The Big Book of Science Fiction.

Weird fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Weird fiction either eschews or radically reinterprets ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and other traditional antagonists of supernatural horror fiction. Writers on the subject of weird fiction, such as China Miéville, sometimes use "the tentacle" to represent this type of writing. The tentacle is a limb-type absent from most of the monsters of European folklore and gothic fiction, but often attached to the monstrous creatures created by weird fiction writers, such as William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, Clark Ashton Smith, and H. P. Lovecraft. Weird fiction often attempts to inspire awe as well as fear in response to its fictional creations, causing commentators like Miéville to paraphrase Goethe in saying that weird fiction evokes a sense of the numinous. Although "weird fiction" has been chiefly used as a historical description for works through the 1930s, it experienced a resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s, under the label of New Weird, which continues into the 21st century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Aickman</span> British writer and conservationist

Robert Fordyce Aickman was an English writer and conservationist. As a conservationist, he co-founded the Inland Waterways Association, a group which has preserved from destruction and restored England's inland canal system. As a writer, he is best known for his supernatural fiction, which he described as "strange stories".

Theodore "Eibon" Donald Klein is an American horror writer and editor.

Laird Samuel Barron is an American author and poet, much of whose work falls within the horror, noir, or horror noir and dark fantasy genres. He has also been the managing editor of the online literary magazine Melic Review. He lives in Upstate New York.

<i>Black Static</i> Speculative fiction magazine

Black Static, formerly The 3rd Alternative, was a British horror magazine edited by Andy Cox. The magazine twice won the British Fantasy Award for "Best Magazine" while The 3rd Alternative twice won the same award for Best Small Press. In addition, individual stories published in the magazine won other awards and were reprinted in a number of collections of the year's best fiction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeffrey Ford</span> American novelist

Jeffrey Ford is an American writer in the fantastic genre tradition, although his works have spanned genres including fantasy, science fiction and mystery. His work is characterized by a sweeping imaginative power, humor, literary allusion, and a fascination with tales told within tales. He is a graduate of Binghamton University, where he studied with the novelist John Gardner.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">W. H. Pugmire</span> American horror writer (1951–2019)

Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire, was a writer of weird fiction and horror fiction based in Seattle, Washington. His works typically were published as W. H. Pugmire and his fiction often paid homage to the lore of Lovecraftian horror. Lovecraft scholar and biographer S. T. Joshi described Pugmire as "the prose-poet of the horror/fantasy field; he may be the best prose-poet we have" and as one of the genre's leading Lovecraftian authors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joel Lane</span>

Joel Lane was a British novelist, short story writer, poet, critic and anthology editor. He received the World Fantasy Award in 2013 and the British Fantasy Award twice.

Mary Rickert, known as M. Rickert, is an American writer of fantasy fiction. Many of her stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Her first collection, Map of Dreams, was published by Golden Gryphon Press in 2006; her second collection, Holiday, appeared in 2010 from the same publisher. She lives in Wisconsin.

Mike Allen is an American news reporter and columnist, as well as an editor and writer of speculative fiction and poetry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph S. Pulver Sr.</span> American writer

Joseph S. Pulver Sr. was an author and poet, much of whose work falls within the horror fiction, noir fiction / hardboiled, and dark fantasy genres. He lived in Germany, and died from COPD and other issues in a German hospital on April 24, 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jason V. Brock</span> American writer, artist, filmmaker, musician

Jason Vincent Brock is an American author, artist, editor and filmmaker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard Thomas (author)</span> American author (born 1967)

Richard Thomas is an American author. His focus is on neo-noir, new_weird, and speculative fiction, typically including elements of violence, mental instability, breaks in reality, unreliable narrators, and tragedies. His work is rich in setting and sensory details—often called maximalism. His writing has also been called transgressive and grotesque. In recent years, his dark fiction has added more hope, leaning into hopepunk. He was Editor-in-Chief at both Dark House Press (2012-2016) and Gamut Magazine (2017-2019).

Exotic Gothic is an anthology series of original short fiction and novel excerpts in the gothic, horror and fantasy genres. A recipient of the World Fantasy Award and Shirley Jackson Awards, it is conceptualized and edited by Danel Olson, a professor of English at Lone Star College in Texas.

Lynda Rucker is an author of horror and fantasy short stories.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carmen Maria Machado</span> American writer

Carmen Maria Machado is an American short story author, essayist, and critic best known for Her Body and Other Parties, a 2017 short story collection, and her memoir In the Dream House, which was published in 2019 and won the 2021 Folio Prize. Machado is frequently published in The New Yorker, Granta, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Her stories have been reprinted in Year's Best Weird Fiction, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year,The New Voices of Fantasy, and Best Women's Erotica.

Nadia Bulkin is an Indonesian-American political scientist and author of short stories, largely in the horror genre.

References

  1. Kaufmann, Nicholas. "The Scariest Part: Simon Strantzas Talks About BURNT BLACK SUNS" . Retrieved 20 May 2014.
  2. "2014 Shirley Jackson Awards Nominees". Shirley Jackson Awards.
  3. Calia, Michael (2 Feb 2014). "Writer Nic Pizzolatto on Thomas Ligotti and the Weird Secrets of 'True Detective'". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 20 May 2014.
  4. "Simon Strantzas to Edit 'Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 3'". Undertow Publications.
  5. "A Chat with S. T. Joshi". YouTube . Retrieved 20 May 2014.
  6. "2014 Shirley Jackson Awards Nominees". Shirley Jackson Awards.