2018 Australian Shadows Award Winner!

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Winner: Australian Shadows Award

I am honoured and thrilled to have received the Australian Shadows Award (best Collected Work 2018) for my short story collection Shadows on the Wall. To be frank, I was both stunned and over the moon.

Thanks go to: Gerry Huntman and the IFWG Publishing Australia team for having faith in my work and publishing the book. Shaun Tan for his generosity providing a fantastic cover painting and an internal illustration for one of my stories. Isobelle Carmody for writing a generous and beautiful introduction. Rebecca Fraser for her great editing.

Thanks to the Australasian Horror Writers Association for making the award possible, and to Silvia Brown for organising and emceeing the awards, and to the convenors and judges.

I would also like to recognise and the other finalists, Kaaron Warren, Andrew Cull, Brian Craddock and David Schembri. I have read their books and they are great, well worth your attention. Go read them if you haven’t already and you’ll see what I mean.

And last, but not least, thanks to support and generosity of my friends the Aussie SpecFic community, those writers who have helped me improve my work, gave me blurbs for the book, launched and spruiked it!

https://australasianhorror.com/australian-shad…/2018-awards/

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2018 – Winner: Australian Shadows Award

Winners of the 2018 Australian Shadows Awards have been announced. The award is given by the Australian Horror Writers Association (AHWA) for “the finest in horror and dark fiction published by an Australasian within the calendar year.”

Shadows Award: Collected Work

*WINNER: Shadows on the Wall by Steven Paulsen.

FINALISTS
Bones by Andrew Cull
The Dalziel Files by Brian Craddock
Exploring Dark Fiction: A Primer by Kaaron Warren
Beneath the Ferny Tree by David Schembri

 

The Best of the Scream Factory

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Fantastic news! The William Atheling Jr. Award winning article “The Hunt for Australian Horror” that I wrote in collaboration with Bill Congreve and Sean McMullen has been reprinted in a beautiful, limited edition hardcover titled The Best of the Scream Factory (edited by Peter Enfantino, Robert Morrish and John Scoleri). At 600 pages long, the book reprints more than 70 articles from the magazine’s golden age. It is published by Cemetry Dance Publications, “widely-considered the world’s leading specialty press publisher of horror and dark suspense”. The entire print run quicklysold out, but not before I got hold of my contributor copy.

Weathering the Future

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I have a short story titled “Yellow Palms” published the Weathering the Future exhibition, a collaboration between Ballarat Words Out Loud, the Soldiers Hill Artist Collective (SHAC), and communication design students from Federation University’s Arts Academy. The exhibition is curated and convened by writers Jason Nahrung and Kirstyn McDermott.

The project was a dual ekphrastic process in which the artists of SHAC responded to the theme of “Weathering the Future”, looking at the hurdles and innovations we face at the beginning of the Anthropocene. Writers at various stages of career responded to these artworks in flash fiction and poetry. These written works were embodied in text art by the Arts Academy students.

If you’re going to be in Ballarat between 6th and 23rd of December 2018, check it out at the Ballarat Backspace Gallery on Camp Street. It will be open Thursdays to Sundays, from noon to 4pm, so drop in for a unique experience if you’re in town.

My story, the artwork by artist Lorraine Huddle, the poster by Bridget O’Brien from the Federation University’s Arts Academy, and an audio of my reading of the story are available online here.

The exhibition was made possible by the City of Ballarat’s Backspace Gallery community arts program.

Ballarat Book Launch Pics & Interview

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The Ballarat Book Launch for my short story collection Shadows on the Wall was a great success. Thanks very much to Jason Nahrung and Kirstyn McDermott for hosting, and to everybody who came along and made it such a success. I had a lot of fun and I hope you did too.

For anyone who was unable to attend the event here are some pics (courtesy and copyright, Jason Nahrung), and a recording of Kirstyn McDermott interviewing me.

Rather than just have me speak at the launch, which might have been quite boring, Kirstyn McDermott interviewed me instead (fantastic suggestion, Jason and Kirstyn!). Here’s the recording of the interview for anyone interested: