Jacey Bedford
Biography

Jacey Bedford is a compulsive writer of science fiction and fantasy with a string of short story publication credits on both sides of the Atlantic. Her first three-book-deal with DAW in the USA began in November 2014. Since then she's had a total of seven books published - the Psi-Tech trilogy, the Rowankind trilogy, and 'The Amber Crown. In 2026 her Psi-Tech trilogy is being published in the UK by Wizard's Tower Press.

She lives with her songwriter husband, Brian, a thousand feet up on the edge of the Yorkshire Pennines in a two-hundred-year-old stone house that takes the first hit when the wind howls off the moor. Though she's travelled extensively she's still a Yorkshire girl at heart. Born in Barnsley, deep in the South Yorkshire Coalfield (remember coalmines?) she's outspoken, practical, and has little time for pretensions. She'd rather have a cup of tea than a glass of champagne. She's also - as you might expect from someone Barnsley born - left wing with a streak of coal-coloured humour.

She has been a children's librarian, a postmistress, a fisherman's smock maker and a folk singer with the a cappella trio, Artisan, performing to 20,000 people at the Philadelphia Folk Festival, 200 people on the gun deck of HMS Victory and 3 people and the landlord's dog at a pub in Kent in the middle of a snowstorm. Her claim to fame is that she once sang live on BBC Radio 4's Loose Ends accompanied by the Doctor (Who?) playing spoons. (Thank you Sylvester McCoy.) She's recorded 14 CDs and completed 35 international singing tours, 31 of them to Canada and the USA.

Her present day-job is booking agent and music-mum to several international folk artists (see here). She can ride a horse, knit a sweater, make a passable soup from six iron nails (as long as they're magic), but she can't add up a column of figures twice and get the same total, or play more than three chords on a concertina. She loves harmony singing, her family, words, and chocolate. She hates cigarettes, fast-fashion, football and 'traveler' spelled with one L, not necessarily all in that order. She has a stationery fetish and truly believes that a blank notebook has unlimited potential for creativity.

She began writing fiction at the age of six and hasn't stopped since. Her first short story sale was in 1998, but it took another fifteen years to make her first novel sale, mainly because - like many writers - she loves the writing process but hates the selling one. (She's getting better at that, honest!) She loves making up stories for pleasure and profit!

Milford SF Writers' Conference
Jacey is a great advocate of professional level critique groups for writers. She's secretary of Milford Writers in the UK, which runs a writers' retreat each May and a critique week each September at the wonderfully atmospheric Gladstone's Library in North Wales.

Short Stories
As light relief from writing novels Jacey occasionally writes short stories which have been published on both sides of the Atlantic, in magazines, online, and in print anthologies including four published by DAW, one by Tor, and several by Zombies Need Brains Press. Her stories have been translated into Estonian, Polish, Galician, Catalan, and Italian.

SF Conventions
Jacey has been on panels at Worldcons, Eastercons, Fantasycons, Novacons, Bristolcons, Sledge Lit, and Andromeda One. She is always happy to sit on panels, and give talks..

Speaking
Jacey is happy to speak to writers' groups, at arts/literature festivals and to young people. Please contact her directly for details. She is based in Yorkshire, UK.

Below:
Fantasycon Panel 2015 - Stealing From the Past, Fantasy in History .
Sharing a joke with Toby Venables.
L-R Juliet E McKenna, Susan Bartholomew, Jacey Bedford, Toby Venables and Anne Lyle.