Lisa L Hannett has written her first column for This is Horror, titled “Wide Open Fear: Australian Horror and Gothic Fiction”, in which she explores the topic through Australian small press short stories, including ours! In fact, she’s kind enough to quote from my introduction to Australis Imaginarium in the very first paragraph, which is pretty cool 🙂 Read the article here – it’s a really interesting look at the topic.
Category: Australis Imaginarium
Of awards and fun!
It seems that I’ve managed to neglect blogging any of the recent awards announcements. This must be remedied!
1. At Swancon (wow, that was a while ago now!) the Ditmar (national) and Tin Duck (Western Australian) speculative fiction awards were announced. Congratulations to everyone who was on the shortlists and especially to the winners of each category!
FableCroft did have a few shortlistings, and although the competition was tough and we didn’t take home any Ditmars for FableCroft, it was great to be on the ballot in the following categories:
Best Collected Work – Worlds Next Door
Best Professional Artwork – cover of Australis Imaginarium by Shaun Tan
Best Fan Writer – Tehani Wessely
Best Achievement – Snapshot 2010 (which DID win! Well done to the Snapshot team, spearheaded by Kathryn Linge).
Full ballot and winners can be found here. (Photo of the Snapshot team by Sandra/Wing Chung)
The Tin Ducks were also very good to us, with the following works on the ballot:
Best WA Professional Short Written Work – “Little Arkham” by Martin Livings (from Worlds Next Door)
Best WA Professional Production – Australis Imaginarium and Worlds Next Door
Best WA Fan Written Work – Tehani Wessely (and I was so delighted – and shocked! – to win this category and take home one of the beautiful trophies).
Best WA Fan Production – Snapshop 2010
Full ballot and worthy winners found here.
That was April! In May we saw the announcement of the Aurealis Awards in Sydney. I was a judge again in 2010 and decided to do a flying visit to Sydney for the awards. I’m really glad I did and it was a wonderful night. Congratulations not only to the nominees and winners but also to SpecFaction NSW, who took on a big job and did it well!
FableCroft had two stories in the Young Adult short story shortlist, “Inksucker” by Aidan Doyle and “Nine Times” by Kaia Landelius and Tansy Rayner Roberts (from Worlds Next Door). Sadly they missed out on the gong but when the winner is Margo Lanagan, it’s a good way to lose! 🙂
Full Aurealis shortlists and judges reports here. (Photo of the Fantasy Short Story judges, Tehani, Simon Petrie and Natalie Maddalena, by Cat Sparks)
There is one more Aussie awards batch yet to come, with the Chronos Awards (the Victorian equivalent of the Tin Ducks) in Melbourne early in June. Shall look forward to more great Australian works being celebrated there!
Congratulations Shaun Tan!
As most everyone knows by now, the wonderful Shaun Tan, who did the gorgeous cover art for Australis Imaginarium, won an Oscar for the short film The Lost Thing, based on his book by the same name. This is such a fantastic achievement, for so many reasons, not the least being that Shaun is from Perth, Australia, and got his start in Australian small press. He’s also a genuinely lovely guy and I feel privileged to have his art grace one of my book covers.
Wins like that deserve celebration, so here at FableCroft we’re going to celebrate by having a big sale on Australis Imaginarium! Get your copy now for $5.00 off the RRP of $24.95 (plus postage) and you too can enjoy Shaun’s art (and the awesome stories) at home!
Sorry, special is over, but please visit our Shop page for great prices!
Australis Imaginarium revealed!
The very awesome Amanda Rainey has worked her magic once again, this time with artwork by illustrious Shaun Tan, creating the cover for Australis Imaginarium. It is beautiful and I love it.
Australis Imaginarium will go to print tomorrow, and, interestingly, because we’re using a different printer this time, will probably arrive the same week as Worlds Next Door! Will post a preorder special real soon!
Book Giveaway Competition: Stories, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio
Last week I received the advance print copies of Worlds Next Door (and it looks beautiful!). This week, I finalised the lineup for Australis Imaginarium and am delighted to announce it!
“Once a Month, on a Sunday” by Ian McHugh
“Night Heron’s Curse” by Thoraiya Dyer
“Hunter of Darkness, Hunter of Light” by Michael Pryor
“A Pig’s Whisper” by Margo Lanagan
“Stealing Free” by Deborah Biancotti
“Suffer the Little Children” by  Rowena Cory Daniells
“Virgin Jackson” by Marianne de Pierres
“The Claws of Native Ghosts” by Lee Battersby
“The Jacaranda Wife” by Angela Slatter
“The Dark Under the Skin” by Dirk Strasser
“Red Ochre” by Lucy Sussex
“Passing the Bone” by Sean Williams
I’m sure you’ll agree it’s an intriguing and totally awesome lineup 🙂
To celebrate Australis Imaginarium being (almost) ready to go to print, we’re giving away another book!
This time, it’s an original anthology of imaginative short fiction edited by bestselling authors Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio – Stories is pretty to look at and packed with awesome authors and their work.
Publisher’s Weekly says: “This collection of 27 never-before published stories from an impressive cast — Roddy Doyle, Joyce Carol Oates, and Stuart O’Nan, among others — sets out to shift genre paradigms. The overarching theme is fantastic fiction, or fiction of the imagination, with fantasy being used in the most broad-sweeping sense rather than signaling the familiar commercial staples of elves, ghouls, and robots.”
Interested? Want a chance to win? Here’s how! We’re celebrating Australian stories in Australis Imaginarium, so in the comments here, simply tell me your favourite Australian novel or short story (or both!) and why you love it. It doesn’t have to be speculative fiction, simply Australian in some way. And yes, it is somewhat ironic that I’m celebrating Australian fiction with the reward of a non-Australian book – I can if I wanna! 🙂
Open to all (happy to post internationally if needs be), winner to be chosen at random from eligible entries. Entries close Sunday July 18, 2010.
FableCroft 