WHEN the Leicester-based writer Graham Joyce died of cancer last September, we lost a great writer and committed, lifelong socialist. 

Joyce, who grew up in a Midlands mining community, quit his job as a youth worker in the dark days of Thatcherism and set off for Greece to try to forge a career as a writer. 

He went on to win the British Fantasy Award for best novel six times, the O Henry Award for short fiction and the World Fantasy Award. Joyce hated the Tories as a young man and his position never shifted. Last year, in spite of being terminally ill, he drew up an online petition calling for the sacking of Michael Gove as education secretary which gathered nearly 150,000 signatures.