FANTAST IN FOCUS: DELPHINE LEBOURGEOIS Delphine Lebourgeois is a collagist and illustrator. A graduate of the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Lyon and Central St Martins, Delphine has had her entrancing artwork featured in publications, such as The Guardian and The New Yorker. All in all, there is a current of effervescence and playfulness that runs…
FANTAST IN FOCUS: PHENDERSON DJÈLÍ CLARK Phenderson Djèlí Clark (aka “The Disgruntled Haradrim”) is a writer, historian, and lecturer. His short stories have appeared in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology, and Daily Science Fiction. In the spring of 2016, Phenderson’s first novella A Dead Djinn in Cairo was published by Tor Books. The story is a fantastical mystery…
“Painting was, from the very beginning, one of the most important instruments of conquest in the sphere of thinking, the mind.” – Guy Brett, “Being Drawn to an Image”, in Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1991). The airy cities of the Altiplano region in South America were once at the forefront of a major culture war. Strangely enough,…
FANTAST IN FOCUS: NISI SHAWL Nisi Shawl is a writer and anthologist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. In 2008, her short story collection Filter House won the prestigious James Tiptree Jr award. Nisi’s other stories and articles have appeared in places like Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Aeon Magazine and Tor.com. Her highly anticipated debut novel Everfair (which…
THEATRE REVIEW: AWAKE AND ASLEEP The Magic, Language, and Society initiative is a new collaboration between The University of Surrey and Treadwell’s Bookshop. In a bid to make certain esoteric aspects of the humanities more accessible to wider audiences, the programme will run events at Treadwell’s, a nucleus of London’s contemporary magical scene. The inaugural…
FANTAST IN FOCUS: SASHA CHAITOW In a way, Sasha Chaitow is following in the footsteps of the earliest philosophers. Many of them spent their lives in the sun-kissed Greek islands as educators and advisers, developing their theories in the presence of cypress trees and Homer’s famous “wine-dark” sea. Sasha however, has developed a more cosmopolitan…
FANTAST IN FOCUS: MOON RIBAS Sir Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that any “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. His statement may ring true in the work of Spanish artist Moon Ribas. In a way, Moon’s art is ‘techno-magical’. She creatively utilises cutting-edge gadgetry to explore the latent possibilities of the human senses. Moon is also…
FANTAST IN FOCUS: ALIYA WHITELEY Aliya Whiteley is an author and librarian. Her new novella from Unsung Stories, The Arrival of the Missives, has just been released and is already making waves. Like her previous novel The Beauty (published in 2014), The Arrival of the Missives is a work of speculative, mind-bending fiction. It’s a seemingly ordinary…
FANTAST IN FOCUS: BARRY MCGLASHAN Reminiscent of the work of Caspar David Friedrich and Frederic Edwin Church, Barry McGlashan’s art is distinguished by its sublimity and profundity. Although Barry was born in Scotland, a country of naturally poetic landforms and history, his paintings have a transcendental quality to them. Often tinted with oneiric colours, they evoke…
FANTASTS IN FOCUS: ANDY PACIOREK AND THE FOLK HORROR REVIVALISTS The Folk Horror Revival (FHR) project is taking the world by storm. In just a few years, the movement has spawned numerous works of art and literature and amassed a significant international following. Its 11,000-member (and counting) Facebook group is both an athenaeum and marketplace…