Aurealis Awards

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Sally's Reading Corner

Winner of the 1998 Aurealis Award for Best Young Adult Novel for Singing the Dogstar Blues, Goodman has also been awarded the DJ O'Hearn Memorial Fellowship at The Australia Centre, Melbourne University in 1999. While Singing the Dogstar Blues won the YA Best Novel category, it was also shortlisted for the Best Science Fiction award. This shows how writing in the genre loosely described by the umbrella term "speculative fiction" can cross all sorts of boundaries -- a good read for teenagers is also a good read for adults.

Singing the Dogstar Blues was written as an extension of the short story "One Last Zoom at the Buzz Bar" which was published by Omnibus Books as part of an anthology called The Patternmaker. Alison has also had feature articles appearing in The Age Epicure, Pursuit and short stories in Eidolon, Aurealis, She's Fantastical, The Terrific Two Get Busted, Verandah and The Patternmaker. In 1998 Goodman was the guest speaker at the Brisbane Writers' Festival, and participated in a program of queer and straight writers reading on the topic of love and lust.

Jane Routley

Routley's Fire Angels was joint winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Australian Fantasy novel in 1998 with Sean McMullen, whose The Centurion's Empire (Tor)

Routley's "To Avalon" (in Dreaming Down Under, HarperCollins Australia) was also shortlisted for the Best Fantasy Short Story Award. It was also nominated for a Ditmar award.

The third book in the Dion trilogy, Aramaya , is due out in June/July this year. Routley is about to sign with Avon for another two books, the first of which will be called The Three Sisters. These are fantasy prequels to the Dion books. There is also a Young Adult SF novel called Children of Gaia which has yet to find a home.

Routley has expressed a desire to see two things in her life: a whale and a volcano. She is currently residing in Denmark, working while she looks forward to returning to Australia.

Jane's fuller biography can be found at the Australian Society of Authors' page, at http://www.asauthors.org/cgi-bin/asadb.pl?what=main&member=5510008.

-- Sarah Endacott