Bio || The short version || Sept-09
Deborah Biancotti is a writer based in inner-city Sydney, Australia. Her first published story won an Aurealis Award and her first collection, A BOOK OF ENDINGS, was shortlisted for the 2010 William L. Crawford Award for Best First Fantasy Book.
Her short fiction has won the Aurealis, the DITMAR and the Australian Shadows Awards. She is now working on her first novel, a near-future psychological thriller, and has a novella lined up for 2010 publication with Gilgamesh Press, alongside two more short stories for WorldCon 2010 in Melbourne. Her work has appeared in Clockwork Phoenix, Eidolon 1, Agog!, Redsine, Orb, Ideomancer, infinity plus, and the anthologies 2012, SOUTHERN BLOOD, YEARS BEST AUSTRALIAN SF & FANTASY and AUSTRALIAN DARK FANTASY & HORROR.
Deborah can be found online at http://deborahb.livejournal.com and http://deborahbiancotti.net.
Bio || The long version
Deborah was born in Cairns (Queensland) in '71, a place prone to thunderstorms and flooding. Behind her first house was a sugar cane field. When sugarcane is green, it's covered in invisible thorns that slip painfully into your skin & stay there forever. When sugarcane isripe, it's burnt & the air smells sticky-sweet. Long strings of black ash spin in the air like stick-ballerinas from a Brothers Grimm tale.
In Queensland, the lightening storms are excellent.
At Deborah's first school, there were only 4 girls in her year. In first grade, they were made to run a race. Deborah accidentally ran third, narrowly missing out on a place in the inter-school competition sports day. She was forced to go to the inter-school competition anyhow, where she was made to wear the school colours (red) and sit in the audience, shouting encouragement at the faster girls.
The faster girls, she noted, were made to sit in the Queensland sun all morning, and then run long distances in the sun, and then sit in the sun again all afternoon.
Every race after that, Deborah made sure to run no faster than third.
Theme: we, who are slower, may also win.
When she was ten, her family moved to a larger town. The school was huge beyond reckoning, & consisted of 4 identical, malevolent, red buildings lined up in a row like bricks in a kiln. In the heat, they sweated and shimmered. And if you looked at them just right -- that is, from the corner of your eye -- you might be able to catch them leap-frogging each other, and shuffling themselves into new and dangerous permutations. Faster than a card shark palming the lady. Each morning, Deborah approached her building (third from the left) with trepidation. Who's to say which was really her building today? Perhaps, during the game of leap-frog, her classroom had been moved entirely, and she would have to spend the day trying and failing to outrun the shifting buildings.
Theme: school years are not necessarily the best ones you'll get.
There were more transfers, and more schools, and then Deborah thankfully got too old for all that bunk. University life suited her much better, there being no running of any kind, and Deborah took to studying English & Psychology. She immersed herself in the workings of the human mind & questions of character. See, she always meant to be a writer, but as yet, she hadn't worked out how.
After uni, she got a job (as Oscar Wilde says, "work is the curse of the drinking classes") and eventually managed to send herself overseas. Life, she decided while there, was meant to be spent in cafes, on trains, in parks or museums, eating foods you couldn't pronounce and meeting people whose ideas were even more crazy than yours. Deborah still has a passion for the exotic, and craziness.
Theme: there, in the unlikeliest of places, you can sometimes find yourself.
Back in Sydney, she worked in various jobs and wondered what to do with herself. In 1998, she attended a workshop at the NSW Writers' Centre, hosted by Terry Dowling. Terry was generous enough to be encouraging, and finding a direction at last, Deborah began to attend SF conventions and generally hang out with writer types. She's been taken aback by the warmth and generosity of 'the community' in Australia, & feels many people have been far more welcoming than any non-proven artist could expect.
Deborah's first story, The First and Final Game, was published online & - later - on paper by Altair. It won the 2000 Aurealis Award for Best Horror Short Story and was also nominated for the Ditmar Award for Best Short Story. In 2001, Deborah won the Ditmar Award for Best New Talent. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Deborah lives in a corridor in Sydney. She still has a phobia about sports and the number 4. She continues to write.
Yet it moves. - Galileo (attributed)
Talking about the earth, after his recantation in front of the Inquisition
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