Dear Necon 38 Campers,
Due to circumstances beyond her control, Sarah Pinborough will not be able to attend Necon 38 this summer. She sends her apologies, and she looks forward to joining us in the near future. On behalf of the entire Necon Family, we’d like to send Sarah our very best. Because of this late change to the dais, Necon will honor any refund requests we receive from Campers who have already registered.
But we’re not expecting to receive too many. Because out of chaos comes opportunity, and we’ve made the most of this one — Necon is thrilled to announce that HELEN MARSHALL has agreed to join us this summer at Necon 38 as a Writer Guest of Honor!
Helen Marshall is a Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. She is also the general director of the Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy there.
Her creative writing aims to bring the past into conversation with the present. After receiving a PhD from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford investigating literature written during the time of the Black Death. Her first collection of fiction, Hair Side, Flesh Side, which won the Sydney J Bounds Award in 2013, emerged from this work as a book historian. Rather than taking the long view of history, her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, negotiated very personal issues of legacy and tradition, creating myth-infused worlds where “love is as liable to cut as to cradle, childhood is a supernatural minefield, and death is ‘the slow undoing of beautiful things’” (Quill&Quire, starred review). It won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award in 2015.
She edited The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, volume 4 this year for Undertow Publications and her debut novel The Migration will be released by Random House Canada in February 2019.
Our sincerest thanks to Helen for accepting our invitation on such short notice, to Sarah for her continued support, and to all Campers for your understanding regarding this unexpected change. We look forward to seeing you all in July!