Graham Joyce: biography, books, photo

Graham Joyce is a unique master of magical realism who wrote such books that we all our lives want to find, but, unfortunately, very rarely we find.

Biography of Graham Joyce

Graham William Joyce in literary circles is better known as Joyce Graham. The biography of the writer did not stand out with any significant events. He was born in the small town of Coventry in 1954. The father of the future celebrity was a simple miner. In 1980, Graham graduated from the University of Leicester. The theme of his master's thesis was dedicated to Thomas Pinchon. The training took place at the Bishop Lonsdale local college. Everything was like a normal average youth.

After graduation, I went to work for an organization called the National Association of Youth Clubs, which specialized in re-educating problem teenagers. Thus, the craving for psychology began to manifest itself from an early age. He worked there more than eight years.

In the last years of his work, Graham Joyce began to think seriously about the writer's career. Immediately after his dismissal, he goes to live on the Greek island of Lesbos. Inspired by the situation, he wrote his first serious work called Dreamside (1988 - 1989). The creative nature of the young writer does not stop, and he goes on a long journey to the Middle East.

In it, he finally decides to engage in professional creative careers and a haven for this chooses a quiet life in England. He moved to Leicester.

Creativity of the writer

Creativity Graham can not be attributed to any one genre. His works absorbed aspects of science fiction, fantasy, traditional horrors, the mainstream, but at the same time filled with supernatural, metaphysical and psychological notes. Most literary critics believe that his thinking was shaped by the influence of such Latin American writers as Julio Cortázar and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And his works are called "magically realistic".

However, the author himself does not agree with this. Graham Joyce argues that his rise as an author was influenced by the works of Algirdon Blackwood and Arthur Machen. A work relates rather to the heat of the weird tale. In an interview with the well-known magazine Locus, he confessed that he was trying to create works completely unlike his previous works, but at the same time to keep the balance between irrational and rational.

Achievements of a young writer

Graham still manages to create absolutely unlike anything that works. And a large number of awards and nominations confirm this. The vast majority of works were awarded honorary awards. The annual award for Best Novel of the Year, created by the British Fantasy Society, was awarded four of his works: The Tooth Fairy, Dark Sister, Requiem, As well as Indigo ("Indigo").

In other, not less significant nominations of World Fantasy and Imaginaire, the novels "The True Life" (The Facts of Life) and "Smoking Poppy" ("Smoking Poppy") were won. These works are also very popular among literary critics. By the way, the last of them was preceded by a two-week excursion to Thailand, where Graham Joyce studied the life of one of the tribes. It specializes in the cultivation of opium poppy.

In all his creative career, Joyce Graham, in addition to outstanding works, created a large number of no less unique stories. The best of them were collected in the author's book Partial Eclipse and Other Stories, as well as in the collections of stories In Dreams, Eurotemps and Darklands 2.

The novel "Poppy smoking"

The work "Poppy smoking" is an absolutely uncompromising and bright hallucinatory novel, like it simply does not exist. He tells the life situation of a simple electrician from England, whose life turned over after he was informed of the detention of his daughter. It turns out that she was trying to take out a load of opium from Thailand. On the proceeds of his daughter, he takes his eldest son and partner in the intellectual game. Once in Thailand, he is at the very center of a huge rotating mechanism of drug trafficking. From one moan there are so-called opium generals, and on the other - centuries-old beliefs of tribes gathering opium.

In this deadly battle he has to fight not only for the life of his own daughter, but also for her soul.

The novel "The Truth of Life"

This work is simply unique, which describes relations in the family, love, war and, of course, magic. In the center of events, one family of seven daughters, led by Marta. Frank, born in the years of the end of the war, is circled among all daughters, and Cassie, his mother, suffers from serious nervous disorders. The little boy is trying to find his place in the commune, learning the craft of embalming. He has a secret mystical friend - A man who is behind the glass and speaks only to Frank. Also, the boy begins to understand that he has the gift of foresight.

The novel "Tooth Fairy"

This work is the most famous of those that created Graham Joyce. Reviews of the book are only positive, and, importantly, even among literary critics. He is represented in the genre of magical realism.

The novel "Tooth Fairy" is based on the old belief that if a small child puts a dying baby tooth under a pillow, the Tooth Fairy at night, while the child is sleeping, will exchange it for a coin.

The work described one of the cases when something went wrong. The novel begins with the fact that Sam, a seven-year-old boy, laying a fallen milk tooth under the pillow, falls asleep in the hope of finding a coin there in the morning. But it's not as it should be, it's because Sam woke up at night and saw the Tooth Fairy. The most terrible thing for a boy is that she is represented not as a benevolent cute princess, but as a sexless evil creature. But even this surprises do not end there. It turns out that it will accompany the boy until the end of his youth. At the same time constantly threatening, frightening, but occasionally helping him.

Unfortunately, the unique writer died on the sixtieth year of life. However, the name of Graham Joyce, books and his uniqueness in the perception of literary art will for a long time please us with his fantasy.

The last years of his life, Graham Joyce and continued to live in England in the city of Leicester, but with two children and his wife Susanna Johnson. In addition to his creative career, he shared his skills with the rest at the University of Nottingham Trent, teaching writing skills.

September 9, 2014, after a long illness, he died.