As announced just after the convention, our Guests of Honor for Norwescon 39 are Tanya Huff (Author), Janny Wurts (Artist), William K. Hartmann (Science), and DAW (Spotlight Publisher), represented by Sheila Gilbert and Betsy Wollheim.
Here’s a little more information on each of them, excerpted from their website(s) and/or Wikipedia entries:
Author Guest of Honor Tanya Huff:
Tanya Sue Huff (born 1957) is a Canadian fantasy author. Her stories have been published since the late 1980s, including five fantasy series and one science fiction series. One of these, her Blood Books series, featuring detective Vicki Nelson, was adapted for television under the title Blood Ties.
Huff is one of the most prominent Canadian authors in the category of contemporary fantasy, a subgenre pioneered by Charles de Lint. Many of the scenes in her stories are near places where she has lived or frequented in Toronto, Kingston, and elsewhere. This author frequently uses as character names the names of people in her circle of acquaintances. A prolific author, “she has written everything from horror to romantic fantasy to contemporary fantasy to humour to space opera.”
— from Wikipedia
Artist Guest of Honor Janny Wurts:
Janny Wurts is the author of Initiate’s Trial and To Ride Hell’s Chasm and thirteen other novels, a short story collection, as well as the internationally best selling Empire trilogy, co authored with Raymond E. Feist. Her most recent title in the Wars of Light and Shadow series, Initiate’s Trial, culminates more than twenty years of carefully evolved ideas. The cover images on the books, both in the US and abroad, are her own paintings, depicting her vision of characters and setting.
Through her combined talents as a writer/illustrator, Janny has immersed herself in a lifelong ambition: to create a seamless interface between words and pictures that will lead reader and viewer into the imagination. […] A self-taught painter, she draws directly from the imagination, creating scenes in a representational style that blurs the edges between dream and reality. She makes few preliminary sketches, but envisions her characters and the scenes that contain them, then executes the final directly from the initial pencil drawing.
— from Janny Wurts’s website
Science Guest of Honor William K. Hartmann:
William Kenneth Hartmann is a noted planetary scientist, artist, author, and writer. He was the first to convince the scientific mainstream that the Earth had once been hit by a planet sized body (Theia), creating both the moon and the Earth’s 23.5° tilt.
Born in Pennsylvania in 1939, he received his B.S. in physics from Pennsylvania State University, and an M.S. in geology and PhD in astronomy from the University of Arizona. His career spans over 40 years, from work in the early 1960s with Gerard Kuiper on Mare Orientale, and work on the Mariner 9 Mars mapping project, to current work on the Mars Global Surveyor imaging team. He is currently a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute.
— from Wikipedia
Spotlight Publisher DAW:
Founded in 1971 by veteran paperback editor Donald A. Wollheim, along with his wife, Elsie B. Wollheim, DAW Books was the first publishing company ever devoted exclusively to science fiction and fantasy. Now more than 30 years and more than a thousand titles later, DAW has a well-deserved reputation for discovering and publishing the hottest talents in the industry. […] Despite its high profile, DAW is still a small private company, owned exclusively by its publishers, Elizabeth R. Wollheim and Sheila E. Gilbert. Betsy and Sheila are strongly committed to discovering and nurturing new talent, and to keeping a personal “family” spirit at DAW—something they feel is all too rare in today’s world of international conglomerate publishing.
— from DAW’s website