Hi, it’s me. Deborah Biancotti. Co-Author of ZEROES with Margo Lanagan and Scott Westerfeld. Author of short story collections, BAD POWER and A BOOK OF ENDINGS and the novella WAKING IN WINTER.
I’m a Sydney-based writer with a background in urban fantasy, horror, contemporary weird, YA, SF and even steampunk on some occasions.
I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, but it took me until I was nearly 30 to write something worth publishing. In 2000 my first short story was published in a ) called Altair. It was called The First and Final Game, and it won the Aurealis Award for Best Horror Short Story.
I kept writing and publishing short stories, very slowly, for nearly ten more years before my first book was published. It was a called A Book of Endings, published by Twelfth Planet Press in 2009. aBoE was shortlisted for the William L. Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Book. The Age called the collection ‘succinct and powerful’. It was nice.
That same year, my story Stone by Stone, was performed by Shades Theatre Company in their ‘shadowmuse‘ production.
In 2011, I published my first novella in an anthology called Ishtar from Gilgamesh Press. It was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award. It had the unlikely (and lengthy) title And The Dead Shall Outnumber The Living which I borrowed from various Ishtar texts and I think maybe even a death metal band.
Also in 2011, I published a short story suite called Bad Power with Twelfth Planet Press: five interlinked stories of ordinary people with weird (and often creepy) superpowers, set in my hometown of Sydney. If you really only want to try one of my short stories, I’d recommend one of these. Or all five, for the adventurous.
Over the years, my stories have been published in venues like Clockwork Phoenix, Ideomancer, Eidolon 1, infinity plus and anthologies including THE YEARS BEST AUSTRALIAN SF & FANTASY, AUSTRALIAN DARK FANTASY AND HORROR, and the US-based Prime Publishing’s YEAR’S BEST DARK FANTASY AND HORROR. I also contributed an essay to TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY GOTHIC.
I haven’t written short stories in a while — been working on longer fiction — but I had 2 stories published in the sadly now defunct Review of Australian Fiction and I had a story in CRANKY LADIES OF HISTORY, from FableCroft Press. I was pretty proud of all these stories.
In 2016, I published a novella with PS Publishing called Waking in Winter. I’m srsly pretty proud of that one.
And then came the Zeroes trilogy and now I’m working on secret stuff that is making me inordinately happy.
That’s me. Who are you?
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Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating. — Kate Braverman