Brian Aldiss

Picture of Martin Reed

Martin Reed

Martin was the SoA's Head of Communications from 2016 to 2024.

22 August 2017

Brian had been a member of the SoA for more than 50 years, serving as distinguished Chair of our Management Committee in 1978, and subsequently for many years on our Council.

He was a huge, prolific talent, deservedly recognised as a towering figure in science fiction since the 1960s, and settling firmly into the position of much-admired elder statesman during his later years.

Brian, during his career, won two Hugo awards and one Nebula award, was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, served as Vice-President of the international H.G. Wells Society and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

His place in the history of English letters is assured, as a founding member of the Groucho Club and recipient of an OBE for Services to Literature – and as a writer who had so much to say, profoundly, not only about the distant future and distant planets, but about the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as he lived them. He will be missed.

27 August 2025

The Society of Authors in Scotland (SoAiS) is deeply disappointed to hear of the closure of the Scottish Book Trust’s Ignite Fellowship. The Fellowship’s loss also underlines the worrying trend of the clear decline of funding for arts and culture across Scotland.

7 August 2025

Our campaign for the rights and interests of authors in the face of big tech companies using copyrighted work to train their generative AI models continues this week.

5 August 2025

Lifetime SoA Fellow 1938-2025