We’re thrilled and honoured to announce that Hometown Haunts: #LoveOzYA Horror Tales, edited by Poppy Nwosu, has been shortlisted for the 2022 Small Press Network Book of the Year Award (formerly the Most Underrated Book Award).

The anthology – the first #LoveOzYA collection to focus entirely on horror – unites a stellar cast of Australia’s finest YA authors with talented new and emerging voices, including two graphic artists.

Earlier this year, we were proud to announce that contributing author Lisa Fuller had won both the Best Young Adult Short Story and the Best Horror Short Story in the 2021 Aurealis Awards, an award that acknowledges excellence in speculative, horror and sci-fi fiction.

To celebrate the shortlisting, and Lisa’s wins, we’re pleased to share her excellent story ‘Don’t Look’ here on the blog.

Robert Harris is a passionate and active advocate for eduction worldwide, having founded Education International in 1993. His recently published Dancing Before Storms: Five revolutions that shaped today’s world is now being considered for addition to the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum.

In this guest post, Robert discusses the importance of teaching young people history and setting them up with the tools to recognise the hallmarks of past mistakes.

Read on below.

We’re pleased to announce the winner of the August WWWC: Janette Parr! Janette’s response to the prompt ‘my father’s gift’ is a bittersweet ode to a father with a penchant for procrastination.

Read Janette’s winning entry, ‘Tomorrow’, below.

‘The one thing these stories have in common, apart from their determination to exist, is a desire to take something familiar and twist it to reveal a different face.’

So says author Sean Williams in his introduction to Uncanny Angles, a collection of short stories by the New York Times bestselling author. Each story in the collection is introduced with a behind-the-scenes sketch of how the story came to be, offering new insights into Sean’s work. At the end of each story, there are tips directing you to others in the collection, inviting readers to choose their own adventure.

We’re pleased to share an edited extract of one of the stories from this collection: ‘Impossible Music’. Read it below.

Banner image features artwork by Shane Bevin

We’re pleased to announce the joint winners of the July WWWC: Valerie Volk and Mike Ladd! This is the first time we’ve announced a joint winner for the WWWC. It’s also the first time that poetry entries have taken out the top prize.

Read Valerie’s winning poem, ‘Moonrise’, and Mike’s winning poem (and accompanying prose), ‘Glimmer of Light’, below.

Environmentally responsible? For Elizabeth Hutchins, it’s a matter of cats. In this guest post, Elizabeth discusses conservation, the ‘cat problem’, and her recently republished children’s novel, A Matter of Cats.

Elizabeth’s dilemma, being a cat lover while appreciating the damage cats do to wildlife, was the catalyst for this novel.

We’re pleased to announce the winner of the June WWWC: Maureen Alsop! Maureen’s response to the prompt ‘heroes and villains’ is an experimental and abstract tale of love, loss and grief.

Read Maureen’s winning entry, ‘Heroes and Villains’, below.