Samantha Lee began writing while she was still a professional performer. Her output is as diverse as it is prolific, covering both fact and fiction and including novels in the sci-fi and dark fantasy genres, self-development and exercise books, short stories and articles, TV series and movie screenplays, literary criticism and poetry. Her work has been translated into French, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, German, Croatian, Greek and Chinese.
Of her eighteen books to date five feature in Scholastic's best-selling imprint 'Point Horror'. A regular columnist for 'Work-out Magazine' for five years and 'The Marbella Times' and 'Viva Espana' for three, she has had over two hundred articles published worldwide. Seventy-eight of her quirky short stories have featured on radio and TV as well as in various best-selling anthologies and popular magazines. A collection of her short stories is now available under the title 'Worse Things than Spiders'. Her black comedy screenplay 'The Gingerbread House' has been sold twice, first to 'Niagara Films' then to 'Random Harvest Productions'.
Sam has taught creative writing workshops in libraries and at literary Festivals all over Britain and acted as Master of Ceremonies at Fantasycon 11. In the Year of Literature she was writer in residence during the 'Welcome to my Nightmare' weekend in Swansea. In 2008 her team 'The Frankensteins' won both the jury and audience awards in the '24 hour challenge' at the Marbella International Film Festival for their five minute short 'Death Dancers'. Sam wrote the screenplay and played the villain, Mamma Sam, a loan-shark with an eyepatch and a bad attitude. She was a jury member at Malaga University's 'Fancine' Fantasy Film Festival the year the jury was chaired by Antonio Banderas.
She writes a romance strand under the pseudonym Petra Webb. Her latest romantic thriller set in southern Spain is 'The Marques'.
Website: www.samanthaleehorror.com
Kate Farrell lives in Edinburgh. She was an actress for over thirty years, in a career that spanned everything from Chekhov to Chucklevision. As she is pathologically indisposed to describe a happy ending, she now principally writes ‘contes cruels’ wherein bad things happen to bad people; sometimes the innocent suffer too. Several of her stories have been published: in Charles Black’s Black Books of Horror, Paul Finch’s Terror Tales, The Screaming Book of Horror and Best British Horror 2014, both edited by Johnny Mains. Kate’s debut novella My Name is Mary Sutherland was published by PS in 2014. And Nobody Lived Happily Ever After for Parallel Universe Publications is her first collection of short stories. Two of her stories, Mea Culpa and My Name Is Mary Sutherland, have won awards, also one sonnet and one haiku. The opening chapter of the novel Or The Cat Gets It won the Linen Press award for their Beginnings Competition. For further information check out the website: mynameiskatefarrell.com and for updates try her Facebook page: mynameiskatefarrell.
"What distinguishes Kate Farrell’s work is the extraordinary accuracy and vividness with which she sets up her situations. She has an eye for detail and an outstanding ear for the way people think and speak. It is far from fanciful to see this at least partly as the product of her experience as an actress. In the theatre, a natural faculty for observing one’s fellow human beings is trained and honed. Listen to the narrator of “Waiting”. If you don’t know someone like that personally, you will have certainly heard her talking just behind you on a bus at some time. The intonation, the accent, the understanding, and the lack of it, are all so true to life. But the people Farrell evokes are not all from one social stratum, or one nation. Here is an ancient and corrupt Irish Priest (“The Way the Truth and the Life”), here is the wife of a notorious Argentinean dictator (“Las Cosas Que Hacemos por el Amor”), or the two Spanish schoolchildren in “The Efficient Use of Reason”, and they are all done with the same conviction, the same ruthless accuracy. Farrell’s eye is not heartless, but it is unclouded by any kind of sentimental affectation; her horrors emerge from what we sometimes call the commonplace. Very occasionally she touches on the supernatural, but when she does she does it superbly as in one of my favourites among her stories “A Murder of Crows” which shows that she can do an uncanny rural atmosphere with grim poetry as well as anyone. It is the gift of every worthwhile writer in this genre to make us realise that just beneath the surface of the banal and ordinary, there yawn great abysses of wonder and terror. I don’t know quite why this realisation, in the hands of a writer like Farrell, should be so thrilling, enjoyable even, but it is. There is not a dull page, not a dull sentence in And Nobody Lived Happily Ever After." From Reggie Oliver 's introduction to And Nobody Lived Happily Ever After
Jessica
Palmer has had 30 books published, both fiction and nonfiction. Her
novels – horror, fantasy and science fiction – were released by Pocket
Books in the United States and Scholastic in the United Kingdom. She has
written two textbooks about Native American history, which were
published by McFarland, and an encyclopedia of natural history released
by Harper Collins’ label Element Books and later by Thorson in the UK.
Palmer
has also written ten science-and-technology manuals on the topics of
explosives and radiation. These were distributed globally. It was this
work that brought her to Great Britain in 1988.
The daughter of a
professional clown, Palmer refers to her switch to writing fiction as an
exercise in damage limitation. She taught classes and conducted
workshops on creative writing and publishing at North Shropshire College
in Whitchurch, Stanmore College and the Islington Arts Factory in
London.
As a journalist, Palmer won awards in New Mexico and Texas
for writing features, public service and breaking news – the most recent
in 2013. Palmer has also written satirical columns for newspapers,
including “A Slice of Life” and “How to Make Love to your Personal
Computer.”
Her two loves are writing and animals. She started a
nonprofit in Kansas for wildlife rescue and has held a wildlife
rehabilitation permit since 2002.
Amazon.co.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment