| Introducing Our
Guests of Honour ... |
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Shaun Tan
Shaun
Tan was born in 1974 and grew up in the northern suburbs
of Perth, Western Australia. In school he became known as
the “good drawer” which partly compensated for
always being the shortest kid in every class. He graduated
from the University of WA in 1995 with joint honours in Fine
Arts and English Literature, and currently works full time
as a freelance artist and author, concentrating mostly on
writing and illustrating picture books.
Shaun began drawing and painting
images for science fiction and horror stories in small-press
magazines as a teenager, and has since then he has received
numerous awards for his picture books, including the CBCA
(Children’s Book Council of Australia) Picture Book
of the Year Award for The Rabbits with John Marsden.
In 2001, Shaun was named Best Artist at the World Fantasy
Awards in Montreal.
He is currently working with
a London-based film producer on a short animated adaptation
of The Lost Thing, a book which won an Honourable
Mention at the Bologna International Book Fair. The Red
Tree recently won the Patricia Wrightson prize in the
NSW Premier’s Book Awards, has been translated into
several languages, and was awarded the 'le Prix Octogones
2003’ prize by the Centre International d'Etudes en
Litterature de Jeunesse in France. Both The Lost Thing
and The Red Tree have resently been adapted as stage
and installation-based productions by theatre companies in
Canberra and Brisbane.
Shaun's new book, The Arrival,
is due for release in October 2006. For a preview, please
click here.
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Charles Stross
Charles
Stross is the author of several SF and fantasy novels,
including Iron Sunrise, The Atrocity Archives,
Accelerando, and the Merchant Princes fantasy
series. His story "The Concrete Jungle" won the
2005 Hugo award for best novella. Although he lives in Edinburgh,
Scotland, he's most widely published in the USA. Prior to
his current existence as a full-time writer he had the usual
range of weird occupations, including hospital pharmacist,
lead programmer at a dot-com, freelance journalist, and tethered
goat at a stake-out.
This will be Charles' first
visit to the southern hemisphere in general and Australia
in particular: if you see him standing on his head by mistake,
please invert.
Charles' award-winning novella,
"The Concrete Jungle", can be read online or downloaded
in PDF form here.
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Margo Lanagan
Margo
Lanagan was born in 1960 in Newcastle, New South Wales,
Australia. She attended Catholic primary and high school,
went to the University of Western Australia in Perth for a
year and finished her BA in History at Sydney University in
1986. She has worked as a kitchen hand and encyclopedia seller,
spent ten years as a freelance book editor, and currently
makes a living as a technical writer.
At the beginning of her writing
career, Margo produced nine pseudonymous teenage romances
under the names Melanie Carter, Mandy McBride, Gilly Lockwood
and Belinda Hayes. Under her own name, she has published fantasy
junior fiction novels WildGame, The Tankermen
and Walking Through Albert; mainstream teenage fiction
novels The Best Thing and Touching Earth Lightly;
and an installment in a shared-world young adult fantasy series,
The Quentaris Chronicles: Treasure Hunters of Quentaris.
She is the author of two acclaimed short story collections,
White Time and Black Juice. A third collection,
Red Spikes, is forthcoming.
Her story, "The Queen's
Notice" from White Time won the 2001 Aurealis
Award for Best Young Adult Short Story. Black Juice
won the 2005 Ditmar Award for Best Collected Work and "Singing
My Sister Down" from that collection was awarded Best
Short Story. That same collection and story also both won
World Fantasy Awards in 2005. Margo currently lives in Sydney
with her partner and their two sons.
Margo's award-winning short
story, "Singing My Sister Down", can be read online
here.
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Fan Guest
of Honour: Bruce Gillespie
Bruce
Gillespie was born in Oakleigh, a suburb of Melbourne,
in 1947. After gaining his BA and Diploma of Education from
the University of Melbourne, he attempted to teach secondary
school for two years. Fortunately, he landed a job in publishing
in 1971 and has been a freelance editor since 1974. Bruce
discovered science fiction fandom in 1968, when he published
his first SF fanzines. He began SF Commentary in
1969, a zine which is still being published infrequently,
and also publishes The Metaphysical Review (since
1984) and Steam Engine Time (since 2001), plus many
smaller magazines.
Bruce has won 18 Ditmar
Awards, three William Atheling Awards, and been nominated
three times for the Hugo Award. Highlights
of his career in SF fandom include being chosen as Fan Guest
of Honour at Aussiecon (World SF Convention in Melbourne,
1999), being the recipient of a special fan fund to travel
to San Francisco for Corflu and Potlatch in 2005, being inducted
as a Lifetime Member of the Melbourne SF Club in 2003, and
being made Annual Past President of the Fan Writers of America
at Corflu in 2005. A lengthy interview with Bruce Gillespie
by Robert Hoge can be found here.
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