Ditmar and Hemming joy!

On Saturday night at the Conflux 9 convention in Canberra, I was very honoured to receive, for Sea Hearts/The Brides of Rollrock Island, the Norma K. Hemming Award (for exploration of race, gender, sexuality, class or disability in science fiction or fantasy), and the Ditmar Award for Best Novel.

Thanks, Deborah Biancotti for hosting a great awards night, and thank you, Hemming and Ditmar judges, for all the hard work that went into making these awards happen.

The judges of the Hemming Award wrote: "Sea Hearts takes us on a journey through what it means to be male and female, lover and loved, thing and person, and Lanagan's rich prose goes beyond the fantastical towards new sensibilities and understandings."

I'm very pleased with myself. :)

Ditmars, Norma K Hemming, CBCA, NSW Premier's

More wonderful shortlistings!

• In the Ditmar awards, Sea Hearts is up for Best Novel, "Significant Dust" from Cracklescape is nominated for Best Novellette and Cracklescape itself is up for Best Collection.
• Sea Hearts is also up for the Norma K. Hemming Award, which will be awarded at the same ceremony next weekend at Conflux, and which "marks excellence in the exploration of themes of race, gender, sexuality, class and disability in the form of science fiction and fantasy". These are named after Norma Kathleen Hemming (1928–1960), fan, actor and writer of science fiction and fantasy.
• Sea Hearts is shortlisted in the Children's Book Council Awards this year, too, for Book of the Year: Older Readers. Winners will be announced on the third Friday in August.
• And the NSW Premier's Literary Awards shortlists have been announced, with Sea Hearts included for the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature. The winners will be announced at a dinner at the State Library the day after the Aurealis Awards night.

I know, it's Shortlist Central around here.

There was a wonderful celebration in Melbourne on Tuesday night to announce the winner of the inaugural Stella Prize. The entire shortlist was flown in for the occasion, and both Helen Garner and the winner, Carrie Tiffany (for Mateship with Birds) delivered terrific addresses. Carrie also donated $10,000 of her $50,000 prize among the five other shortlistees, which was a total surprise and very kind of her!

Here she is accepting her prize, with the shortlist either side of her (Michelle de Kretser is there too, behind the camera on the left—there was TV coverage on the ABC and SBS news), in a photo taken by Demet Divaroren.

Two new interviews

Alan Baxter asked a bunch of writers about our "ongoing angst" and posted a great series of interviews on his blog. Here's mine; the other subjects are Kaaron Warren, Jo Anderton, Lisa Hannett, Angela Slatter and Trudi Canavan. Find out what we're all afraid of.

And the Stella Prize is running interviews with shortlistees and judges over on its site; explore all those, too.

Oh, and remember that Indie shortlisting?

Well, look here!

Sea Hearts, winner,
Children's and YA section,
Australian Independent Booksellers
Awards 2013

Newcastle Writers Festival this weekend—come one, come all!

Newcastle (NSW, Australia) is having its first writers' festival this weekend, and it's going to be a juicy one. Here is the program. If Anita Heiss, Michael Chamberlain, Jane Caro and David Marr aren't enough for you, come along and see me, too. I'll be on:

• at 11.15 a.m. on Saturday in the Lock-Up Cultural Centre (in the Gallery), with Felicity Pulman and Alexa Moses, being wrangled by Kaz Delaney, talking about "why Young Adult fiction isn't just for teens" on the Crossing Over panel
• at 1.30 p.m. on Sunday in the Hunter Room at the City Hall, on the Dreaming Australia panel. Russell Blackford will be there making sure that Janeen Webb and I get a word in edgewise alongside the ebullient Jack Dann, as we celebrate home-grown speculative fiction.

I also hope to sneak off and visit the Treasures of Newcastle from the Macquarie Era exhibition at the Newcastle Art Gallery, because, you know, history? (Here's the Macquarie collector's chest from 1818.)