Tag Archives: horror

Book Deal: Poetry Collection by Silvia Canton Rondoni

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IFWG is very pleased to announce a book deal with Silvia Canton Rondoni for a collection of poetry (‘Stark Naked’), along with a significant number of illustrations by Silvia Nieto. “Silvia Canton Rondoni has been associated with IFWG for a few years now, both as a contributor of fiction as well as a capable editor and translator, “said IFWG Managing Director, Gerry Huntman. “The moment we read samples of her poetry a little over a year ago we realised that this was a strong element of her reservoir of talent, and needed to be shared with readers. Silvia’s poetry is intensely personal and insightful, ingredients that separate the notable from the mundane. It is also dark and neatly dovetails into the horror sub-genre. Her association with Silvia Nieto adds icing to the cake, a remarkable artist who deeply appreciates Ms Rondoni’s visions and emotional fabric.”

The work-in-progress book blurb for this collections is as follows:

Stark Naked is a collection of poems filled with raw emotion and brutal honesty. A deeply personal journey that strips away the layers of the poet’s dark past and transitions through loss and grief to reveal Silvia Canton Rondoni’s resilient spirit.
A personal friend of the poet for almost twenty years, Silvia Nieto’s illustrations provide a visual soul that resonates with the written work.
Silvia CR photo
Silvia Canton Rondoni is a Spanish-born Australian horror writer and poet. Her short stories have been published in Australia and overseas under her pen name Silvia Brown. Silvia lived and worked in Ireland, Canada, The Netherlands, (and Melbourne) before moving to Canberra to focus on her writing career.

Her current projects include her poetry collection, short story commissions and a literary translation.

Silvia enjoys long naps with her bulldog Patch and attending writing conventions.

Website: https://silviabrown.wixsite.com/portfolio

Silvia-Nieto-ilustradora

Silvia Nieto is a Spanish-born illustrator and pattern designer based in the UK.

Website: https://www.bysilvianieto.com/en/home-en/

 

Stark Naked will be published world-wide around the middle of 2021, and will be lushly illustrated by Silvia Nieto, including cover art and design. Stay tuned for more information as we approach this release date.

Taking Submissions – Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies

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SPAWN Book Cover

Deadline: 31 August 2020
Payment: 6c per word for original stories, 2c per word for reprints (Australian currency)
Publisher: IFWG Publishing Australia (co-published in North America through the IFWG Publishing International imprint)
Note: Open to Australian writers only (citizens, residents and ex-pats)

To be edited by award-winning author Deborah Sheldon, Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies will comprise stories from Australian writers obtained via commission and open callout. The commissioned writers are the multi-award-winning and bestselling authors Isobelle Carmody, Jack Dann, Kaaron Warren and Sean Williams.

On-spec submissions are welcome from Australian writers of every persuasion including non-parents. Ideally, stories should be between 1500 and 5000 words, give or take. (Stories significantly longer than 5000 words would have to be outstanding.) Reprints will be considered, but must not be available for free anywhere online—the anthology will have only a small number of reprints, regardless. Artwork by commissioned Australian artists will complement selected stories.

The anthology will be a visceral, frightening read. Each story must nominally tick the box of “body horror” but there is no restriction on subgenre: anything from sci-fi to fantasy to gothic to supernatural to psychological and beyond will be given equal consideration. Feel free to play with the theme and not take it too literally. Ideally, your story should make the reader feel uncomfortably aware of their physicality, morbidity or mortality.

While graphic violence and swearing are acceptable, submissions must have a literary bent. Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies aims to deliver an elegant—and elevated—anthology of body horror.

What to avoid:

  • Gratuitous gore used purely for shock value.
  • Familiar tropes, such as Rosemary’s Baby, The Handmaid’s Tale, the face-hugger/chest-burster from the Alien film franchise, Martians kidnapping and impregnating female Earthlings, and so on.
  • The submission of first drafts, often indicated by spelling and grammatical errors.

Required rights:

  • First worldwide electronic and print rights in the English language, exclusive for one year, and non-exclusive rights thereafter.
  • For reprints, non-exclusive rights apply.
  • If the story is subsequently reprinted, please credit Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies (IFWG Publishing Australia) as the original publisher.

How to submit:

  • Your story must be in a Word document, double-spaced, Times New Roman in 12pt.
  • Your name, contact details and word count should be on the first page above the title.
  • Use double-quotation marks, single space after full stops, first-line indents, page numbers, and Australian-English spelling. No tabs and no double-returns between paragraphs.
  • Send to Deborah Sheldon at spawnsubmissions@gmail.com with the story title and your name as the Subject heading.
  • In the body of your email, provide an author bio of about 100 words (give or take), and include your Australian citizen/resident/ex-pat status.
  • If your story is a reprint, provide the full details of its first publication in the body of your email, with links if possible.
  • You can submit more than one story. Submit each story in a separate email.
  • Stories that require anything more than line editing or adjustments for house style will be rejected. Please submit only polished work of a high standard.
  • No simultaneous submissions, which means do not submit your story to another market at the same time.
  • Give yourself the best possible chance—please do not ignore these guidelines.

Response issues:

  • All acceptance and rejection emails will be sent by 31 October 2020.
  • No feedback will be offered for rejected stories. Please don’t ask.
  • Do not resubmit a rejected story, even if you have made substantial changes.
  • Accepted writers will receive payment via PayPal or bank transfer within 30 days of the contracts being signed, rather than on publication.
  • Accepted writers will also receive an ebook and one complimentary paperback.

Important note about the publication date

Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies was originally slated for release in February 2021. In response to the economic turndown caused by the coronavirus pandemic, IFWG Publishing Australia has decided to delay release of every upcoming new title. Therefore, Spawn: Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies will be released later in 2021, with a strong likelihood of a mid-year publishing date.

Crowd-funding for a hardback edition, which would include illustrations for each story, is also being considered.

IFWG Publishing Australia will provide further updates on the anthology’s publication schedule in due course.

Cover Reveal: The Crying Forest by Venero (Veny) Armanno

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CF Final Front Cover

It is with great pleasure that IFWG can reveal the cover for Veny Armanno’s upcoming novel, The Crying Forest. It contains wonderful artwork by Daniele Sera, an artist well known in the horror and dark fantasy market.

The novel will be finalised in coming months, to wait in the release queue, available for sale when the marketplace is stabilised following the current COVID-19 crisis.

Agata Rosso, a once-mighty yet now prematurely aged European witch, believes that the special gifts in a young girl named Lía Munro can restore youth and vitality both to herself and her bedridden husband. She sets a deadly plan in motion to capture and use Lía—but will the girl have enough power to protect herself, plus the father she loves so much?

An earlier version full cover wrap of the art is also striking:

cover_wrap_art_final

Books Deal with Kaaron Warren & Ellen Datlow

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Kaaron Warren & Ellen Datlow taken by Cat Sparks

Ellen Datlow & Kaaron Warren (photo by Cat Sparks)

IFWG Publishing is extremely pleased to have acquired the publishing rights for five titles by Kaaron Warren, one of which is a collaboration with multi-award winning editor Ellen Datlow.

Three Warren titles are transfers of rights from a previous publisher (Slights, Mistification and Walking the Tree) and two are original works: Morace’s Story (a middlegrade novella that closely ties with Walking the Tree, where both will be published worldwide simultaneously), and Tool Tales, a chap-book that will contain original photography by Ellen Datlow paired with micro-fiction by Warren—all associated with images of old tools that are odd, weird, or whose utility are largely forgotten over time. Warren’s prose sources inspiration and stream of consciousness from these images.

All five titles will be published on return to normalcy in the marketplace following the current COVID-19 crisis, but Slights will be available in ebook format in coming months. All three reprints will be augmented with new creative material, notably a bonus related short fiction piece for Slights, and Walking the Tree will be closely associated with Morace’s Story—it will be the same story as Walking the Tree, but through the eyes of a young protagonist. IFWG views this pairing as an exciting project with an original approach to bridging literature across different age groups. IFWG will provide more news on enhancements to Mistification at a later date.

Tool Tales brings Ellen Datlow into the project as an artistic contributor, which contrasts with her usual expert role as an editor. IFWG was approached by Warren and Datlow following their social media success in matching Kaaron’s speculative fiction writing against Datlow’s collection of images of tools, to turn this exercise into a print and ebook collection. IFWG recognised the potential interest in this project in the wider reading community, and also saw it as a superior reference work for writers’ workshops and classes.

IFWG Publishing views these acquisitions as a strong investment, injecting two projects with unique offerings to the market (Morace’s Story’s pairing with Walking the Tree, and the creative collaboration between Warren and Datlow in Tool Tales). Additionally, IFWG values the addition of five titles bearing Warren’s respected name to its current catalogue of two books (the multi-award winning novel, The Grief Hole, and her collection of short fiction, The Gate Theory).

Kaaron Warren’s Bio:

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. Kaaron was a Fellow at the Museum for Australian Democracy, where she researched prime ministers, artists and serial killers.

She has published five multi-award winning novels (Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, The Grief Hole and Tide of Stone) and seven short story collections, including the multi-award winning Through Splintered Walls. She has won the ACT Writers and Publishers Award four times and twice been awarded the Canberra Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Her most recent novella, Into Bones Like Oil (Meerkat Press) is on the Final Ballot for the Stoker Award, the Recommended Reading List for Locus and the Aurealis Award Shortlist.

Ellen Datlow’s Bio:

Ellen Datlow has been editing sf/f/h short fiction for four decades. She was fiction editor of OMNI Magazine and SCIFICTION and currently acquires short stories and novellas for Tor.com and Nightfire. She has edited many anthologies for adults, young adults, and children, including The Best Horror of the Year series and Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles, and the reprint anthologies Edited By and Body Shocks. She’s won multiple Locus, Hugo, Stoker, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Awards plus the 2012 Il Posto Nero Black Spot Award for Excellence as Best Foreign Editor. Datlow was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention for “outstanding contribution to the genre” and was honored with the Life Achievement Award given by the Horror Writers Association, in acknowledgment of superior achievement over an entire career and honored with the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award at the 2014 World Fantasy Convention.

She runs the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in the east village, NYC, with Matthew Kressel.

New Release: Drive, She Said, and Other Stories by Tracie McBride

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Drive, She Said Book Cover

It is with pleasure that we can announce the UK and Australian release of Melbourne-based author, Tracie McBride’s collection of short fiction titled ‘Drive, She Said, and Other Stories’. “What attracted IFWG to Tracie’s short fiction,” said Gerry Huntman, Managing Director, “wasn’t just the quality and weirdness/darkness of her narrative. It was the collection itself, that centred female characters in each and every story. Something different, something compelling.” We welcome Tracie to IFWG’s fold, confident that her work will be greeted with a great response to this horror collection.

The magnificent artwork and cover design was rendered by IFWG regular, Keely Van Order.

A collection of horror and dark fantasy short stories.

The themes and settings are diverse, but one common thread runs through the stories—they all feature women.

Women as protagonists. Women as doomed heroines. Woman as villains. Mothers and spinsters, wives and prostitutes, sisters and witches.

And in some stories, monsters in feminine form.

The collection will be released in North America on the 1st April 2020, through our International imprint – it is available for preorder through various outlets.

McBride profile

Tracie McBride

New Acquisition: Bedding the Lamia by David Kuraria

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IFWG is very pleased to announce the acquisition of a collection of four stories by David Kuraria, called ‘Bedding the Lamia’. Two of the stories are reprints (found in Midnight Echo, the other in Dimension 6). “Kuraria has already contributed to a few of IFWG’s anthologies, and has won acclaim in that particular journey,” said Gerry Huntman, Managing Director of IFWG, “and it is wonderful to have the opportunity to showcase his work in a long-fiction collection.”

David Kuraria

Of Melanesian and Scottish heritage, the author was raised by his extended family on the island of Ranongga in the Solomon Islands. He attended Kingsland Intermediate school in Auckland New Zealand before reuniting with his family in the Solomon’s capital, Honiara. To date, David has had just three stories published in Australian Anthologies. His 2018 story Kõpura Rising (published in Cthulhu: Land of the Long White Cloud), describes a malign, marine-dwelling race named Kõpura. That tale was selected as a finalist for the 2018 Australian Aurealis Awards for Best Horror Novella and added to Ellen Datlow’s 2018 Best Horror of the Year recommended reading List. This is his first collection.

The four stories are:

The Gods of Mwaia
A Melanesian farmer and his companions trek to a secretive Solomon Island tribe to beg for land rights for his starving People. They bear gifts of persuasion but become gifts for the dominant tribe’s frightful gods.

And He Shall Suffer for his Art
An artist experimenting with narcotics and obscure occult methods inadvertently calls up an unwelcome muse. The price paid for a favour is bloody and final.

Silent is the River
A war historian, a young New Zealand teacher and an Aboriginal Spiritual man travel up a Northern Australian River on a converted war barge. Here brutal Colonial past reaches out to ensnare modern adventurers on a journey into horror.

The Absurd Quest of Thomas Wu
A survivor of the 2011 Christchurch New Zealand earthquakes takes his deceased grandfather’s diaries to recreate the old man’s 1950s travels around Melanesia. He soon finds himself crossing a borderland into a strange ‘otherworld’, where any action has blackly comical and unpleasant consequences.

IFWG Publishing will release Bedding the Lamia in the first quarter of 2021.