Rosalie and I are very sorry to report the death of the author Rebecca Lloyd. We don’t really remember discussing anything with Becca other than books and writing, about which she was very passionate, although we know she was born in New Zealand, studied at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and spent many years in medical healthcare, often abroad. Her Facebook page says that she was formerly a Medical Parasitologist at Gonja Bombo Hospital in Tanzania.
We were first in contact when Becca submitted her collection Mercy to
us, which was published in 2014. She had been writing and publishing
fiction since at least 2002 and had won the Bristol Short Story Prize
for her story 'The River' in 2008. She had also been shortlisted in the
2010 for the Dundee International Book Prize and was a semi-finalist in
the Hudson Prize for a short story collection in the same year. Her
novel Halfling was published by Walker Books in 2011, and in the following year she was co-editor with Indira Chandrasekhar, of Pangea an Anthology of Stories from Around the Globe, with Thames River Press. In 2014, her short story collection Whelp and Other Stories was shortlisted in the Paul Bowles Award for Short Fiction, and her collection The View From Endless Street had been published by WiDo Publishing.
We published Becca’s Seven Strange Stories in 2017, and she was also published by Egaeus Press (Ragman and Other Family Curses, 2016) and Zagava (The Bellboy,
2018). Other literary awards in which she has been acknowledged include
The World Fantasy Award, The Aestas Short Story Prize, and the Paul
Bowles Short Fiction Award. Some of her stories were reprinted in Best British Horror, (Salt Publishing), Best New Horror, (PS Publishing), and in recent volumes of Best Horror of the Year.
Personally, my favourite of all Becca’s books is The Child Cephalina (Tartarus
Press, 2019), which managed to be a sensitive piece of historical
fiction, while being seriously weird and terrifying. In a Facebook Post
of 2025, Becca wrote how surprised she was to have been so drawn to
historical fiction:
Maybe
I like the research, although you can easily bury yourself in it as a
writer, but I also like the weirdness of things past. I've never thought
horror or weird has to be invented by writers; I see both those things,
and a heady mixture of both, in our very human lives.
Becca was a forthright advocate for women’s rights, continually intellectually inquisitive, and with a great sense of humour. We would like to send our condolences to her two daughters, and to her family and wide number of friends.
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