One bite of an apple from a family shrine unearths hungry ghosts. A poison garden unfurls a polite boy’s deepest, darkest desires. Interfering with an Indigenous burial site unleashes ancestral revenge, to a metal soundtrack. An underground dance party during Covid threatens to turn lethal. And on the edge of a coastal rainforest, a grieving sister waits to witness a mysterious ‘unravelling’. This #LoveOzYA anthology – the first 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. Contributors are Wai Chim, Sarah Epstein, Alison Evans, Lisa Fuller, Margot McGovern, Poppy Nwosu, Michelle O’Connell, Emma Osborne, Emma Preston, Marianna Shek, Holden Sheppard, Jared Thomas, Vikki Wakefield and Felix Wilkins. The stories in this wide-ranging collection dig deep and go hard. While some are straight-up terrifying rollercoaster rides, others are psychologically rooted in our society’s deepest fears and concerns: acceptance and fitting in, love and loss, desire and temptation, and the terror of a world threatened by catastrophic change … and even collapse.
Authors
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Holden Sheppard is an award-winning West Australian author. His debut novel Invisible Boys (Fremantle Press, 2019), about three teenage boys coming of age and coming to terms with their sexuality in the regional town of Geraldton, won multiple accolades, including the 2019 West Australian Premier's Prize for an Emerging Writer and the 2018 City of Fremantle Hungerford Award. In 2020, Invisible Boys was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards and was named a Notable Book by the Children's Book Council of Australia. The novel is now in development as a television series. Holden's second novel The Brink (Text Publishing, 2022), about a group of school leavers whose post-graduation holiday is thrown into chaos by a death, won the Young Adult Book of the Year Award at the 2023 Indie Book Awards. The Brink is currently shortlisted for the 2023 NSW Premier's Literary Awards and was named one of the Best Books of 2022 by The West Australian. Holden's writing has been published in books including Growing Up in Country Australia (Black Inc, 2022), Hometown Haunts (Wakefield Press, 2021), How To Be An Author (Fremantle Press, 2021) and Bright Lights, No City (Margaret River Press, 2019). He has written articles for WA Today, 10 Daily, the Huffington Post, the ABC and DNA Magazine. His creative works have been published in journals including Griffith Review, Westerly, page seventeen and Indigo Journal. When he's not writing, Holden works out at the gym, plays touch footy (AFL), barracks for the Collingwood Football Club and occasionally works as a labourer. He lives in Perth with his husband.
Sarah Epstein is an award-winning Australian author who resides in Melbourne with her family. Her first two young adult novels, Small Spaces and Deep Water, have been translated into multiple languages, and Small Spaces has also been optioned for film. Sarah’s writing has been nominated for numerous literary awards, and she has been the recipient of the Adelaide Festival Young Adult Fiction Award, the Davitt Award for Best YA Crime Novel, and Honour Book from the Children’s Book Council of Australia. Sarah’s short fiction is featured in the Hometown Haunts anthology, and she has launched a contemporary YA series, Leftovers, and a new YA thriller, Night Lights, under her own imprint. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Alison Evans is the author of Ida, which won the People’s Choice Award at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2017. Their second novel, Highway Bodies, was published earlier this year and they are a contributor to new anthology, Kindred: 12 Queer #LoveOzYA Stories. They are based in Melbourne. You can find out more at alisonwritesthings.com
Emma is a fiction writer and poet from Melbourne, Australia. She was once engaged in a bear-hug so epic in nature that both parties fell over. She has a large collection of robot t-shirts and uses comic books as wall art. She loves new books and new music and will happily share both. Her poetry has appeared in Star*Line and Apex Magazine. Her fiction has appeared in Aurealis, Bastion Science Fiction Magazine and Shock Totem: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted. Her story "The Box Wife" is forthcoming in the Year's Best Australian Fantasy and Horror and will soon appear at Pseudopod. Emma is currently working on a novel.
Lisa Fuller is a Wuilli Wuilli woman from Eidsvold, Queensland, and is also descended from Gooreng Gooreng and Wakka Wakka peoples. She won a 2019 black&write! Writing Fellowship, the 2017 David Unaipon Award for an Unpublished Indigenous Writer, the 2018 Varuna Eleanor Dark Flagship Fellowship, and was a joint winner of the 2018 Copyright Agency Fellowships for First Nations Writers. She has previously published poetry, blogs and short fiction. Lisa is an editor and publishing consultant, and is passionate about culturally appropriate writing and publishing. Lisa is a member of Us Mob Writing, the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild, the First Nations Australia Writers Network, and the Canberra Society of Editors.
