Meet Graham Edwards

Every Friday, we meet a member of the BFS and peer deep into their soul (or, at least, a form they filled out). Want to be featured? Email us: content@britishfantasysociety.org

Your Influences

Tell us about the book/film/thing that got you into SFFH: What was it? How old were you? What impact did it have on you?

This question got me sifting through a heap of early memories that include reading Clive King’s “Stig of the Dump,” Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “At the Earth’s Core” and Richard Adams’s “Watership Down,” listening to the original BBC Radio 4 broadcasts of Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and sneaking into the cinema to see Ridley Scott’s “Alien” on its first release at the tender age of 14.

With all that in mind, I’m going to plump for Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator,” the lesser known of Charlie Bucket’s adventures with Willy Wonka. After exploring an orbiting space hotel infested with blobby alien monsters called Vermicious Knids, Charlie wrestles with some seriously existential mathematics as his beloved grandparents age backwards so rapidly they’re catapulted into Minusland. In my memory at least, “Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator” hits that sweet spot where the story maintains its own impeccable internal logic, yet you still feel like absolutely anything could happen. If that isn’t the definition of good fantasy, I don’t know what is.

Where do you draw your creative inspiration from?

Primarily the visual arts. Before I wrote things, I drew things, and I’ve been a movie nerd for as long as I can remember. I’ve been a published author since the mid-‘90s, but for a long time it was the visual world that paid the bills thanks to a succession of day jobs working as a designer, illustrator and animator. Even when I worked full-time as staff writer on the much-missed VFX magazine Cinefex, I was writing articles about—you guessed it—the movies. All of which is a long-winded way of saying I tend to see things before I write them. There’s a film projector in my head that’s been running for as long as I can remember. Much of what it shows me is garbage, but every so often a sequence of images flashes up that sets my imagination on fire.

Your Work

You’re stuck in an elevator for 60 seconds with that hero, and they want you to describe your work. Give us the pitch.

Speculative fiction that looks like it belongs in one category, but sits just as happily in a second. Possibly a third.

Where and when do you create/are you at your most creative?

Anywhere I can sit comfortably and quietly with my laptop. Over the years that’s included the kitchen table at 5am before heading out to work, the train carriage while commuting to work, and the server room at lunchtime while taking a break from work. These days I work from home, pretty much to my own schedule, so the biggest challenge is maintaining the boundary between work and play. Because, however seriously you take it, creative writing is play, right?

What’s the best advice you’ve received about creativity?

I can’t remember who said it, but it goes: “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”

What’s your writing soundtrack?

Silence.

Fiction or non-fiction?
Fiction … although I’ve had some fabulous times writing non-fiction, too

Poetry or prose?
Prose

Plotter or pantser?
Plotting gets me off the starting block, then I’m pantsing all the way to the finish line

Reading or listening?
Reading

The Home Stretch

What’s the best thing about being part of the SFFH community?

The reassurance that I’m not alone in having a brain that works this way.

Time to plug your stuff! Where can we find you and your work? What have you got coming up? Consider this your advertising space.

You can check me out at my website, where you’ll find loads of background information about me and my writing. I blog on a semi-regular (okay, highly erratic) basis about the craft of writing, reflections on creativity and SFFH, my favourite books and movies … anything that springs to mind, really.

Recently I reacquired the rights to my back catalogue, and self-published new editions of my novels dating back to the very first: “Dragoncharm”, originally published in 1995 by HarperVoyager (BTW the new edition cover art is mine, too). My website has links to purchase all the books, plus a scattering of free fiction, and extracts from some of my Cinefex articles on the making of movies including “Star Trek Beyond,” “Alien: Covenant,” “The Shape of Water,” and many more. Meanwhile my YouTube channel is brimming with book trailers, together with a few other curiosities.

I’m a member of the Society of Authors.

• Official website: graham-edwards.com
• YouTube channel: @graham-edwards

A final thought…

“The Picture” (below) hangs on the wall above my desk, a constant reminder that, when it comes to being creative, anything goes.

It’s an eclectic mix. Look hard and you’ll see the cast of “Star Wars” rubbing shoulders with Superman, Indiana Jones and a host of aliens from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. There’s a Triffid and a Tribble, that funky beachball alien from Dark Star, the Alien xenomorph is playing saxophone and … well, I’ll leave you to explore the rest.