Our attending membership rate is due to rise from $125 to $150 as of September 1st, so if you want to take advantage of the lower rate please buy your membership now.
We also note that we are currently only about 100 memberships away from the cap we have been asked to keep to by the World Fantasy Board. Memberships are currently coming in very quickly and it seems likely that we will hit that cap.
We have had several requests of late asking about membership transfers and room shares. We are not in a position to arrange these for you, but there is a World Fantasy Con LiveJournal community (not run by us) which you may find useful for making such arrangements.
We are delighted to announce that the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award winners for 2009 are Jane Yolen and Ellen Asher. Their awards will be officially presented at the Awards Banquet on the Sunday of the convention.
Our congratulations to our Guest of Honor, Ann VanderMeer who, together with Stephen H. Segal, won a Hugo Award in the Best Semiprozine category at the weekend for their magazine, Weird Tales. The Hugo Award ceremony took place on Sunday night at Worldcon in Montreal. Ann’s husband, Jeff, also one of our Guests of Honor, blogged about the award here.
Weird Tales is also nominated for a World Fantasy Award in the Special Award: Professional category. Ann and Jeff are jointly nominated in the Anthology category for their book, Steampunk.
The list of nominees for the 2009 World Fantasy Awards has been announced. You can find them here.
Interested in exhibiting in our Art Show? Full guidelines as to how to apply for a place are online here.
Tickets for the 2009 World Fantasy Awards Banquet are now on sale. There will be a choice of a beef, chicken, or vegetarian menu. Banquet tickets are $75 per person or $750 for a table of ten. You must be a member of the convention to purchase banquet tickets, and every person holding a ticket must be a member of the convention. For example, you could buy several tickets on your membership and give the tickets to other people, but those people would have to also be members of the convention in order to attend the banquet.
You can purchase tickets online on the membership registration page (scroll down to “Purchase add-ons” section if you already have a membership), or by mail. Details and further explanation are on the Banquets page.
Please note that in Progress Report 1, the e-mail address listed for questions and information about the banquet is wrong. the correct address is banquet@worldfantasy2009.org.
Progress Report 1 mailed on July 8. We mailed PRs to all of our members and to those members of the previous two World Fantasy Conventions. You can also download a PDF of the progress report here.
A PDF copy of our first progress report can be found online here. Paper copies should be arriving in the mail very soon.
We are delighted to announce the addition of two California-based Special Guests to our line-up.
Donald Sidney-Fryer is a poet, a troubadour and an expert in the works of Clark Aston Smith.
Richard A Lupoff is a Hugo Award-winning writer and publisher.
Both will be fine additions to our line-up.