Erin Gough’s ‘Benny Wins Powerball’ was first published in Going Down Swinging, number 32, September 2011.
Martin Lindsay’s ‘Someone Called Rob’ was first published in [untitled], issue 5, Busybird Publishing, June 2012.
Eva Lomski’s ‘And Senseless Acts’ was first published in The Sleepers Almanac No. 7, Sleepers Publishing, Melbourne, 2011.
Zoe Norton Lodge’s ‘Yia Yia on Papou’ was first published in Going Down Swinging, number 32, September 2011.
A.S. Patric’s ‘Guns ’N Coffee’ was first published in fourW twenty-two, November 2011. It has since been published in Las Vegas for Vegans, Wakefield Press, Melbourne, 2012.
Bram Presser’s ‘Crumbs’ won the 2011 Age Short-Story Award and was first published in the Age, 7 January 2012. It has since been published in Award Winning Australian Writing 2012, Melbourne Books, Melbourne, 2012.
Sean Rabin’s ‘I Can Hear the Ice Singing’ was first published in Permafrost, volume 43, issue 1, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Winter 2012.
Emma Schwarcz’s ‘Sidney’ was first published in the Big Issue, number 388, 30 August–12 September 2011.
Kate Simonian’s ‘Scott’ was first published in the UTS Writers’ Anthology: Hide Your Fires, number 26, May 2012.
David Sornig’s ‘Your Voice Is Lead’ was first published in Harvard Review 41, Fall/Winter 2011.
Chris Womersley’s ‘A Lovely and Terrible Thing’ was first published online in Granta, 21 October 2012. It has since been shortlisted for the 2012 BBC International Short Story Award.
Eric Yoshiaki Dando’s ‘Human Beans’ was first published in The Sleepers Almanac No. 7, Sleepers Publishing, Melbourne, 2011.
Notes on Contributors
THE EDITOR
Sonya Hartnett is the internationally acclaimed author of many novels. In 2003, her adult novel Of a Boy won the Age Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. In 2000 and again in 2003, she was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelists of the Year. Her work has been published internationally with editions available in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Germany, Italy, Norway and Denmark. In 2008, she was the first Australian recipient of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. She lives in Melbourne with her dog, Shilo, and cats, Marcus and Morgan.
THE AUTHORS
Romy Ash’s debut novel, Floundering, is published by Text Publishing. She has written for Griffith Review, the Big Issue and frankie magazine. She writes a cooking column for Yen magazine and the blog Trotski & Ash. She was co-winner of the 2011 Griffith Review Emerging Writers Prize for fiction.
David Astle is a puzzle-maker with a lifelong bent for storytelling. He has written two novels, a true-crime thriller, a trivia/travel guide to Australia and a memoir, Puzzled, just relaunched in the UK. His latest book is Puzzles and Words (Allen & Unwin, 2012).
Jon Bauer is the author of short stories and plays and a novel, Rocks in the Belly, which won Best Debut in the Indie Awards, was longlisted for the Miles Franklin and was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. It has been published in eight countries.
Greg Bogaerts lives in Cooranbong, New South Wales. He has had many short stories published in journals, anthologies and newspapers. His novel, Black Diamonds and Dust, was published by Vulgar Press.
James Bradley is a novelist and critic. His books include three novels, Wrack, The Deep Field and The Resurrectionist, all of which have won or been shortlisted for major literary awards and been widely translated; a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus; and The Penguin Book of the Ocean. He writes and reviews for a wide range of newspapers and magazines in Australia and internationally, and blogs at cityoftongues.com. In 2012 he won the Pascall Prize for Criticism.
David Brooks has published numerous novels, works of poetry and short fiction. He teaches Australian literature at the University of Sydney and is co-editor of Southerly. His latest book is a novel, The Conversation (UQP, 2012).
Kevin Brophy teaches creative writing at the University of Melbourne. He has had twelve books of poetry, fiction and essays published. The latest is Radar (Walleah Press, 2012), a collection of prose poems co-authored with Nathan Curnow. From 1980 to 1994 he was founding editor of Going Down Swinging with Myron Lysenko. He was awarded the Martha Richardson Medal for poetry in 2005 and in 2009 he was co-winner of the Calibre Prize for an outstanding essay.
Liam Davison has published four novels and two collections of short fiction. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the National Book Council Award for Fiction for his novel Soundings. His short fiction has been widely anthologised and has previously appeared in The Best Australian Stories 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2011, and The Best Australian Stories: A Ten-Year Collection. He is a regular contributor to the books pages of the Australian and lives in Melbourne.
Michel Dignand was a freelance writer, mostly for the Sydney Morning Herald but for other newspapers and magazines as well, from roughly 1985 to 1990. He was a copywriter for an award-winning advertising agency, senior copywriter for the radio station 2WG, and then joined a department of the New South Wales government as an editor and publisher for eighteen years. He now writes fiction full time.
Brooke Dunnell’s short stories have been published in Meanjin, Westerly, New Australian Stories 2, The Best Australian Stories 2009, Allnighter and Voiceworks. Born in Perth, she has a PhD in Creative Writing and is currently working on her first novel.
David Francis’s first novel, Agapanthus Tango, was published internationally in seven languages and in the United States as The Great Inland Sea. His second novel, Stray Dog Winter, was named Book of the Year in the Advocate and Novel of the Year in the Australian Literature Review. It was a 2009 Lambda Literary Award finalist and won the 2010 American Library Association Stonewall Book Award – Barbara Gittings Literature Award. His short fiction has appeared in the Harvard Review, The Best Australian Stories 2010, Griffith Review and Meanjin. Film rights to The Great Inland Sea and Stray Dog Winter have been optioned in France and Australia respectively. For more information go to www.straydogwinter.com.
Matthew Gabriel has lived and worked for most of his life in Melbourne. He is now doing that in Adelaide. He is a writer of short stories and is currently working on a novel as part of his Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide.
Erin Gough’s award-winning short stories have been published in a number of journals and collections, including Southerly, Overland, Small Wonder, Going Down Swinging and The Best Australian Stories 2004. She is currently writing a novel for young adults.
Alan Gould has published eight novels, twelve volumes of poetry and a collection of essays. Among his awards are the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award (1981), the NBC Banjo Award (1992), the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry (2006) and shortlistings for both the Miles Franklin and the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. His latest novel, autobiographical in substance, is The Seaglass Spiral (Finlay Lloyd, 2012) and he has a second collection of essays, Bolero and the Sea, due to be published in 2013.
Marion Halligan was born in Newcastle, New South Wales. She grew up by the sea and has lived most of her adult life in Canberra, with periods in Paris. She writes novels, short stories and essays. Valley of Grace (Allen & Unwin, 2009) won the ACT Book of the Year and was longlisted for the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her latest is a collection of short stories, Shooting the Fox (Allen & Unwin, 2011).
Rebecca Harrison has degrees in English and philosophy and this year completed a Masters of Creative Writing at the University of Sydney. The story ‘Scissors’ comes from a suite of related stories that she is presently turning into her first novel.
Ashley Hay has published four books of narrative non-fiction and a novel, The Body in the Clouds, which was shortlisted for various Australian prizes and longlisted
for the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. A former literary editor of the Bulletin, her work has appeared in publications including Australian Geographic, the Australian, the Monthly, Good Weekend, Griffith Review and the Guardian. This year, her story ‘The Aussie Mozzie Posse’ has been shortlisted for a Eureka Prize and selected for the Best Australian Science Writing (NewSouth Publishing, 2012). Her new novel, The Railwayman’s Wife, will be published next April by Allen & Unwin.
Sarah Holland-Batt’s first book, Aria, won the Arts ACT Judith Wright Prize, the Anne Elder Award and the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted in both the New South Wales and Queensland Premiers’ Literary Awards. She was recently a Fulbright Scholar at New York University, where she completed her MFA.
Martin Lindsay, based in Perth, is the author of three plays. He is wantonly procrastinating over a novel. He breaks things for a living as a software tester.
Eva Lomski lives and writes in Melbourne. Her stories have been published in The Sleepers Almanac, Kill Your Darlings, Griffith Review and Island. In 2012 she was awarded a Grace Marion Wilson Mentorship and is currently working on her first novel.
Anthony Lynch lives on the Bellarine Peninsula in Victoria. His work has appeared in the Age, Island, Southerly and The Best Australian Poems 2010 and 2011, and been read on ABC Radio National. His short-story collection Redfin (Arcadia, 2007) was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards. His poetry collection Night Train, published in 2011 by Clouds of Magellan, was runner-up in the 2012 Wesley Michel Wright Poetry Prize.
Alex Miller is the author of ten novels. His books are published internationally and have been translated into many languages. He has twice won the Miles Franklin Literary Award, in 1993 for The Ancestor Game and in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He has been an overall winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and has twice won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards. He received the Age Book of the Year Award in 2010 for his bestselling novel Lovesong. In the same year he was awarded the Manning Clark Medal for an Outstanding Contribution to Australian Cultural Life. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2011. His most recent novel is Autumn Laing, published by Allen & Unwin in 2011.
Zoe Norton Lodge is a storyteller and theatre maker. Over the last few years she has worked as associate artist at Tamarama Rock Surfers Theatre Company and as manager of the National Young Writers’ Festival. In 2012 she worked with The Chaser on The Hamster Wheel. Her short stories have been published in literary journals and she is now working on a book. She is co-creator of the Sydney storytelling night Story Club and presents the ‘Bluffer’s Guides’ on Radio National.
Meredi Ortega was born in Albany and grew up in the mining town of Tom Price, Western Australia. Her short stories have appeared in The Kid on the Karaoke Stage & Other Stories (Fremantle Press, 2011) and indigo, and her poems in Westerly, indigo, Cordite and the Science Made Marvellous chapbooks.
A.S. Patric is the author of Las Vegas for Vegans, published in 2012 by Transit Lounge. His debut book, The Rattler & Other Stories, was published in 2011. He has been published in The Best Australian Stories 2010, the Sydney Morning Herald, Meanjin, Overland, Southerly, Quadrant and many other literary journals.
Bram Presser schlepped around the world for ten years in the acclaimed punk band Yidcore. His story ‘The Prisoner of Babel’ was published in The Sleepers Almanac in 2011. ‘Crumbs,’ a story based on his grandfather’s 1930 escape from a small shtetl, won the 2011 Age Short Story Award. When not writing fiction, Bram pens the literary blog Bait for Bookworms and occasionally works as a criminal lawyer.
Sean Rabin was born in Hobart but now lives in Sydney. He is a freelance writer and recently completed his first novel.
Emma Schwarcz is a Melbourne-based writer and editor. Her stories have been published in New Australian Stories 2, the Big Issue, the Age and harvest magazine.
Kate Simonian recently graduated with a Masters of Creative Writing from the University of Technology, Sydney. Her work has been published in Blue Crow, Visible Ink and The UTS Writers’ Anthology 2012: Hide Your Fires. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is studying fiction at the City University of New York.
David Sornig’s published writing includes short fiction, memoir, essays, reviews and literary criticism. His novel Spiel was published by UWAP in 2009. He is a fiction editor for Wet Ink and literary reviewer for the Melbourne Review, and he has taught creative writing at Deakin, Victoria and Flinders universities. In 2008–09 he was the Charles Pick Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and in 2011 was awarded grants by the Australia Council and Arts SA to continue work on a new novel. He lives in Melbourne and can be found at www.davidsornig.com.
Chris Womersley’s fiction and reviews have appeared in Granta, The Best Australian Stories 2006, 2010 and 2011, Griffith Review, Meanjin and the Age. His first novel, The Low Road, won the Ned Kelly Award. His second, Bereft, won the Indie Award for Best Fiction and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, the UK Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award and the Australian Society of Literature Gold Medal. You can visit him at www.chriswomersley.com.
Eric Yoshiaki Dando was born in Japan but now lives in Daylesford. He has had stories, cartoons and poems published here and there. He is best known for his cult classic novel Snail. ‘Human Beans’ is taken from his new graphic novel, Beautiful Useful Things. He blogs at www.ericdando.com.
The Best Australian Stories 2012 Page 39