Bram Stoker Award

Long time advocate for New Zealand writers and New Zealand stories, Lee Murray,  has recently been nominated, and shortlisted, in two categories of the international Horror Writers Association for its coveted Bram Stoker Awards® for superior achievement in horror writing.

What is really exciting is that Lee is the only New Zealander to reach the finals in two categories, and the only first-time nominee to appear on the shortlists both as a writer and an editor in the same year.

 

Lee has found herself in well respected company along with, author-editor Marty Young, (co-nominee for Macabre: A Journey Through Australia’s Darkest Fears, in 2010), screenwriter Taika Waititi (nominee for What We Do in the Shadows, in 2015) and British writer Allyson Bird (who moved to New Zealand in 2011, the year she won the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel for Isis Unbound

In a two-stage process which combines member and jury voting, Murray has been shortlisted for her work on Hellhole: An Anthology of Subterranean Terror (Adrenalin Press) and for her short story Dead End Town a Lovecraft-style ‘personal horror’ set small-town New Zealand and involving local mythology, which appears in Cthulhu Deep Down Under II (IFWG). Murray’s novels (including one co-written with Dan Rabarts) have previously reached the preliminary ballot of the prestigious awards whose winners include Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, George R. R. Martin, Joyce Carol Oates, and Neil Gaiman, among others, but this is the first time she has progressed to the finals.

The winners of the Bram Stoker Awards® will be announced at a banquet to be held in Grand Rapids, Michigan in May 2019.

“Lee Murray’s Dead End Town takes us back into the realm of personal horror, or perhaps personal apocalypse. Murray expertly avoids the tropes and trappings of Lovecraft, but at the same time mines the ichor and uncertain parentage that seems to accompany cosmic monstrosities and redirects them into a subtle but inescapable realm of body horror.” — Peter Rawlik

 

Links:
This year’s full shortlist is available here: http://horror.org/2018-bram-stoker-awards-final-ballot/
About the awards: http://www.thebramstokerawards.com/the-bram-stoker-awards/

Fun facts: http://www.thebramstokerawards.com/uncategorized/fun-facts/
Lee’s website: https://www.leemurray.info/

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