About
Lisa L Hannett is based in Adelaide, South Australia. She used to feel weird speaking about herself in the third person but has learned to embrace this convention: it makes a fair bit of sense, she’s realised, considering she often feels like several different people.
In an earlier life, Lisa lived in Canada where she earned an Honours degree in Fine Arts (majoring in painting and photography). Nowadays, she uses 10% of the things she learned during the course of these studies doing graphic design work for university academics in Adelaide. Occasionally, she designs fun things like book jackets.
Another version of Lisa earned an Honours degree in English in South Australia. Subsequently, this part of her personality got it into her head that doing a PhD in medieval Icelandic literature (of all things!) would be a good idea. So in 2005 she began this immense task, and completed it in 2011 (HUZZAH!!!).
The Lisa you’re here to see is a writer of speculative fiction, largely of the creepy or unsettling variety. She is also a graduate of Clarion South. Her short stories have appeared in venues including Clarkesworld Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, ChiZine, Midnight Echo, Electric Velocipede, Tesseracts 14, Shimmer and Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s Steampunk Reloaded, among other places. (Her complete bibliography is here.) Her stories have won three Aurealis Awards, and have appeared on Locus’s Recommended Reading List, Tangent Online’s Recommended Reading List, as well as in The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2010.
Her first collection of short stories, Bluegrass Symphony, (Ticonderoga Publications) won the 2011 Aurealis Award for Best Collection. It deals with cowboys and fallow fields, shapeshifters and rednecks, superstitions and realities in harsh prairie country — and a whole bunch of other things thrown in the mix.
Her second collection, Midnight and Moonshine (co-authored with Angela Slatter) will be published in November 2012.
Currently, Lisa is working on The Familiar, her first novel, which revolves around witches and shapeshifting lunatics, and is the first book in a projected series of three. And because this Lisa has no concept of time restrictions, and is apparently accustomed to existing on very little sleep, she is also working on a few other projects. Lament for the Afterlife is a book of interconnected stories, set in the same world as ‘The Good Window’ (published in Fantasy) and centring on themes of belief, war, and loss. The next is a romp through the underworld (can one ‘romp’ through the underworld, you ask? Here’s hoping) and is tentatively called Steam. The third, another mosaic novel, will indulge Lisa’s love of food, fairy tales, and history and will follow the adventures of a humble sous-chef as he gathers delicious titbits in Feast.
Undoubtedly, these works will be categorised as ‘Dark Fantasy’ or ‘Horror’, which is hilarious considering all versions of Lisa are afraid of the dark.
