While we’re talking awards news, the winners of the Australian Shadows Award have been announced, and I was very pleased to see Kaaron Warren win Best Long Fiction for Slights, which I still think was the best novel of the year despite being a deeply unpleasant reading experience (in, you know, a good way). Deborah Biancotti also took out Best Short Fiction for “Six Suicides” from A Book of Endings (Twelfth Planet Press), which is exciting – while the reader feedback for this book as a whole was very positive, the individual stories didn’t receive much attention in the early days so it’s lovely to see a bit of happy awardness going to it now.

Grants Pass edited by Jennifer Brozek & Amanda Pillar (Morrigan Books) took the third Shadows Award for Best Edited Publication which means 100% female recipients this year.

The words “no women in horror my arse” come to mind, somehow.

Congratulations to all the winners. I’d add my hope that the winner statues this year are less offensively sexist than in previous years, but I suspect this won’t be the case. I suppose someone could always knit a few sensible jumpers for the poor lasses, though trenchcoats might be more appropriate, somehow.

Deborah Biancotti has written a gorgeous essay about how creepy, horrific, threatening and generally unfriendly she finds the Australian landscape. It’s a brilliant piece of writing, undercutting and at the same time contributing to a couple of centuries of problematic attempts by writers and artists to describe, capture and define something that is pretty damn alien.

I remember hearing a story of a “genius” English painter who came out to Australia to capture the landscape, only to discover that we had the wrong kind of green. Not in paint, you understand. The trees were the wrong kind of green. Traditionally, most 19th century Australian painters approached our landscape as if it was – well, England, only without the hedgehogs.

I’m sure every country and culture has an idealised literary tradition to rail against. (Have you read a Beatrix Potter lately? Jemima Puddleduck, for example, rivals Tess of the D’Urbervilles for a place on the list of “books that make you want to kill yourself.”) But there’s something about Australia – the combination of fear and dread and danger and shame… the fact that even someone my age was so swamped with British culture that I have struggled to understand or appreciate any of the Great Australian Authors.

I live in Tasmania, which is completely unlike most of the rest of Australia. The thing, though, about Australia, is that just about everywhere is unlike most of the rest of Australia. The idea of some kind of collective identity seems strange. I remember when I and the other ROR writers were putting our series bible and pitch for the Lost Shimmaron series – we all lived in different parts of Australia, but we needed a town to base all the stories in. For the sake of appealing to as wide a range of Australian kids as possible, we needed somewhere generic, but you know, there is no generic Australian town, or generic Australian experience. There’s a big difference between living in Queensland, or New South Wales, or Tasmania, and that’s even before you get to the great divide between the eastern and western states.

(more…)

I had heard vaguely of the SFX horror screw-up, but only today (via this great summary post from  nwhyte) found my way to the blog of Maura McHugh, aka Splinister to read about her correspondence with the editor of that magazine, about the lack of representation of female authors in the SFX Horror special. Maura objected to a general lack of women in the entire issue, but was particularly upset by a special feature in which 34 horror “experts” were invited to recommend “hidden treasures of horror”. They were all men – and all but one of them (Doctor Who & Being Human’s Toby Whithouse!) only recommended work by men.

Maura’s long post showing her correspondence with the SFX editor is worth a read, because it shows in paragraph after paragraph, the (by now) familiar sight of a privileged person who has been called on his (undoubtedly unconscious) sexism and that by extension of his publication and the industry he belongs to, and yet is not willing to accept or acknowledge that he has done anything wrong.

You could create a bingo card from his responses: they meant to include women, they thought about it, they intended to, but one article and two email correspondences went astray, and besides, there aren’t that many women in horror anyway, and if there are any, they don’t send their books to SFX, and they don’t make enough films, and when women do make horror it’s not really horror, and look, he has two anonymous female friends who confirm it’s not his fault, he meant well…

Besides, don’t you know there aren’t any women producing or consuming horror fiction and films?

Well, there aren’t if your only source of information is SFX magazine.

I’m not a big horror reader, but I see the same arguments being used that are regularly trotted out about women in SF. I have nothing but respect for editors and other people in positions of power who, when called on the inappropriate lack of representation of women, take that accusation seriously, and make an honest effort to do something about it in the future. Falling victim to unconscious bias does not make you a bad person. There’s no need to be defensive about it. But once it’s been pointed out to you… trying to pretend that it doesn’t exist is just silly.

As Maura says here, there is no excuse now. Not just with horror. In science fiction. In literature. In film. In awards lists. It’s been pointed out too many times. If you’re still contributing to the invisibling of women (awesome verb by the way) then ignorance is not an excuse. Unless, you know, you’re also not listening to what women say…

Hmm. That would make a lot of sense, actually.

February was Women in Horror Recognition Month (ironic, no?). I recommend you celebrate by reading a Kaaron Warren novel. Or two. Or recommend your own favourite hidden treasure of horror in the comments.