Robert Runté, PhD, is currently Senior Editor with EssentialEdits.ca and SFeditor.ca; before that he was Senior Editor at Five Rivers Publishing. He has provided developmental editing on over 30 traditionally published books, primarily speculative fiction. He also spent over 30 years as a professor at the University of Lethbridge. As an academic, editor, reviewer, and organizer, Robert has been actively promoting Canadian SF for nearly 40 years. He was a founding Director of NonCon, Context89, and SFCanada; and has served on the Boards of the Edmonton Science Fiction and Comic Arts Society, On Spec Magazine, Tesseract Books, and The Writers Guild of Alberta. In addition to dozens of conference papers, journal articles, book chapters, and a half dozen entries in the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, Robert edited 149 issues of various SF newsletters.
In terms of his own fiction, he has published over 45 short stories in a variety of magazines and anthologies, over 30 of which have been reprinted and/or adapted for podcast, and five of which were reprinted in 'Best of' collections, most recently, Canadian Shorts II, The Chorochronos Archives, and the Best of Metastellar.
Robert was the Editor Guest at When Words Collide / Canvention 36 (Calgary, Aug. 2016) and the Scholar Keynote Speaker at the Academic Conference on Canadian SF&F. His ACCSFF talk was subsequently awarded a 2014 Aurora Award, and published in The Canadian Fantastic in Focus: New Perspectives (Allan Weiss, ed.) In 1996 he co-edited (with Yves Meyard) the Tesseracts5 SF anthology. In 1994 he was honored as Fan Guest at the 52nd WorldCon held in Winnipeg. In 1989, his Guide to Canadian Science Fiction won an Aurora Award; he won his second Aurora in 1990 for his promotion of Canadian SF.
Dr. Runté was also the co-editor of the popular textbook, Thinking About Teaching, and two of the novels by first-time authors he edited were shortlisted for Aurora Awards. In 2019 he inherited 10+ incomplete manuscripts from the late, great fantasy author, Dave Duncan, to finish and publish. The first two of these are The Traitor's Son and Corridore to Nightmare, due out from Shadowpaw Press in 2024.
