Fantasy and horror writer Tanith Lee dies aged 67

The British science fiction, fantasy and horror author Tanith Lee has died at the age of 67.

Lee was the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award, in 1980, with her novel Death’s Master, the second in her Tales from the Flat Earth fantasy series. Born in 1947, she wrote more than 90 novels and 300 short stories during her writing life.

She was also a prolific poet, penned radio plays, and wrote two episodes of the seminal British science fiction TV series Blake’s 7.

The SF website Tor.com lists her many other accolades: World Fantasy Awards for Best Short Story in 1983 and 1984 and recipient of Lifetime Achievement Awards from both the World Fantasy Convention in 2013 and the Horror Writers Association just this year.

However, Lee – who died on Sunday leaving a husband, the artist and writer John Kaiine – seemed to have fallen out of favour as a writer in recent years, as did many writers who came to prominence in the SF fields in the Seventies. Writing in the Guardian in 2010 about Death’s Master, Alison Flood quoted an interview Lee gave to SF magazine Locus in which she said: “If anyone ever wonders why there’s nothing coming from me, it’s not my fault. I’m doing the work. No, I haven’t deteriorated or gone insane. Suddenly, I just can’t get anything into print.”

Born in 1947 to dancer parents, Lee published her first novel 1971 - a children’s book called The Dragon Hoard. She also wrote under the pseudonym Esther Garber, and her first adult book was The Birthgrave, in 1975.

Jane Johnson, publishing director at Harper’s SF/Fantasy imprint Voyager, said: “I published Tanith for only a short period at (seven years) during her immense career, but as always with Tanith that time was intense and marked by flashes of both brilliance and mischief.

“She was as playful off the page as she was on it and loved nothing better than queening it in grand style at dinners and soirees, at which she excelled. I loved her fiction. It was, like her, inventive, elegant, sexy, bursting with imagination and gorgeous imagery.

“If anyone has not read Silver Metal Lover (for instance), I urge them to do so: it pushes so many edges of the genre envelope, being tragic, erotic, wildly romantic, a powerful forerunner of modern YA science fiction.”

Lee’s website now displays simply the dates of her birth and death and a quote from her writings: “Though we come and go, and pass into the shadows, where we leave behind us stories told – on paper, on the wings of butterflies, on the wind, on the hearts of others – there we are remembered, there we work magic and great change – passing on the fire like a torch – forever and forever. Till the sky falls, and all things are flawless and need no words at all.”

Tributes have poured in on social networks this week, with British horror writer Ramsey Campbell tweeting: “Yet more sad news - another remarkable person and writer gone. I hope Tanith Lee is somewhere magical.”

Fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay said on Twitter: “We’ve just lost someone I greatly admired as a person & writer. Terrible news, such a hard year for these departures.”

Writer and critic Roz Kaveney, meanwhile, posted on her LiveJournal a poem entitled “For Tanith”, which includes the lines: “Her words like petals fell/or snow. Made new and strange what lies below transforming every story that we know”.