We are excited to announce the addition of award-winning author Kaaron Warren to our lineup of featured writers for our upcoming series!

Shirley Jackson award-winner Kaaron Warren published her first short story in 1993 and has had fiction in print every year since. She was recently given the Peter McNamara Lifetime Achievement Award and was Guest of Honour at World Fantasy 2018, Stokercon 2019 and Geysercon 2019.  She has also been Guest of Honour at Conflux in Canberra and Genrecon in Brisbane. She has lived in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Fiji, drawing inspiration from every place. 

She has published five multi-award winning novels (Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, The Grief Hole and Tide of Stone, all now from IFWG) and seven short story collections, including IFWG’s The Gate Theory. Her most recent short story collection is A Primer to Kaaron Warren from Dark Moon Books. Her most recent novella, Into Bones Like Oil (Meerkat Press), was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award and the Bram Stoker Award, winning the Aurealis Award. Her stories have appeared in both Ellen Datlow’s and Paula Guran’s Year’s Best anthologies. Both The Grief Hole and the novella “Sky”, from her collection Through Splintered Walls (Twelfth Planet Press) won all three of the Australian genre awards. 

Kaaron was a Fellow at the Museum for Australian Democracy, where she researched prime ministers, artists and serial killers. In 2018 she was Established Artist in Residence at Katharine Susannah Prichard House in Western Australia. She’s taught workshops in haunted asylums, old morgues and second hand clothing shops and she’s mentored several writers through a number of programs. She is part of the popular podcast Let the Cat In, alongside J. Ashley-Smith and Aaron Dries. 

She has been shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award and has also been a judge for those awards, as well as judging the Shirley Jackson Awards, the Aurealis Awards, the Stoker Awards, and the Australian Shadows Awards. 

Her most recent books include Tool Tales, a chapbook in collaboration with Ellen Datlow (IFWG), and Capturing Ghosts, a writing advice chapbook from Brain Jar Press. She has two recent novellas. “The Deathplace Set” in Vandal, from Crystal Lake Publishing, alongside Aaron Dries and J.S. Breukelaar, and “Bitters”, from Cemetery Dance. She won the inaugural AsylumFest Ghost Story Telling Competition in 2022.