Cathy Butler and Farah Mendlesohn will be running an academic conference dedicated to the work of Diana Wynne Jones next year in Bristol. The dates of 9-11 August have been chosen deliberately to allow people to attend both this conference and Worldcon in Dublin the following weekend. With the Eurocon in Belfast a week later I guess I need to take the whole of August 2019 as vacation.

For those not in the know, Bristol is a short hop across the sea from Dublin with frequent flights from the local airport. Or you can take the train to Holyhead and take the ferry.

Farah has been running a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the deposit on the venue. That funded in less than a day, though there are still a few things left and there may be new rewards later, and you can still help out by ordering the ebook of the conference papers.

The conference will be at the Watershed. I’m not sure whether this means that there will be movies as well, but IMHO Watershed would be silly not to cash in on having a whole pile of DWJ experts on hand.

I haven’t told Jodi yet, but it makes a lot of sense to hold a BristolCon Fringe event on the 12th. That gives people a day to be tourists in Bristol and an additional SF event before heading to Ireland. We might event get an overseas reader or two, depending on who is in town.