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).

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, completed it in 2011, and is now an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Flinders University.

This Lisa also writes about Vikings and the Viking Age: her latest book is Viking Women: Life and Lore (Thames & Hudson, 2023) and she’s working on its sequel as we speak. Viking Women: Myth and Magic is due out in 2025.

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, The Dark, Weird Tales, Apex, Electric Velocipede, and Shimmer, among other places. (Her complete bibliography is here.) Her stories have won four Aurealis Awards, and have appeared on Locus’s Recommended Reading List, as well as in The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror,  Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Fiction, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror.

Her first collection of short stories, Bluegrass Symphony (Ticonderoga Publications) won the 2011 Aurealis Award for Best Collection, and was nominated for a World Fantasy 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 first novel, Lament for the Afterlife, was published by ChiZine Publications in 2015, and won the 2016 Australian National Science Fiction (‘Ditmar’) Award for Best Novel:

No one knows when the war against the greys began. There are theories, speculations, but the only certainties are air-raids, abductions, and inner city explosions. Assaults are endless, swift and lethal; the enemy’s stealth unsurpassed. Whispers have circulated for centuries, thoughts spinning from minds in visible wordwinds, clear for all to read, to wield, to steal. Where are the greys? When will they next strike? How can you attack something you can’t see? And secretly, fearfully: Are the greys even real? Spanning decades, Lament for the Afterlife follows one man as he negotiates the hostile territory of life after combat. Peytr Borysson comes from a long line of soldiers, but isn’t born for fighting. His ‘wind is better shaped for poetry than bullets. Even so, at sixteen he follows the local boys into battle – and never quite leaves. Interweaving Peytr’s struggles with those of his family, Lament for the Afterlife takes readers to the frontlines and far beyond, telling a story of ordinary people persisting in extraordinary circumstances. A novel of human survival, guilt, and the devastating power of memory, Lament for the Afterlife examines the physical and psychological distances we travel when beliefs are threatened – or held too tightly.

Her second collection, Midnight and Moonshine (co-authored with Angela Slatter) was published in November 2012. It received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, appeared on Locus‘s Recommended Reading List, and was nominated for Best Collection at the Aurealis Awards in 2012.

The Female Factory, her third collection (also co-authored with Angela Slatter), was published in December 2014, and won Best Collection at the Aurealis Awards in 2015.

Her latest collection, The Fortunate Isles, indulges her love of ships, sailors, fishermen, and mermaids… and has been published in the most beautiful hardcover edition ever.

Undoubtedly, most of these works will be categorised as ‘Dark Fantasy’ or ‘Horror’, which is hilarious considering all versions of Lisa are afraid of the dark.

SHORT BIO FOR INTERVIEWS, ARTICLES AND OTHER SUCH PUBLICATIONS:

Lisa L. Hannett has had over 80 short stories appear in speculative fiction venues including Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Weird Tales, Apex, The Dark and Year’s Best anthologies in Australia, Canada and the US. She has won four Aurealis Awards, an Australian National Science Fiction Award, an Australian Shadows Award, and her first book was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Her latest collection of dark fantasy stories is The Fortunate Isles. You can find her online on Instagram @LisaLHannett.