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The Dying Rain and Other Forays into the Bramble Noir is on the Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award longlist
Meet Tyler Bramble, the grimy future’s answer to Philip Marlowe. Armed with what he considers to be a razor-sharp wit and what his supervisor considers to be a troubling history vis-a-vis illicit pharmaceuticals, Tyler takes on drug dealers, dodgy doctors and extortioners, and it’s all in the name of the long suffering Victorian taxpayer. These Bramble Noirs—wise cracking, off-beat, occasionally zany tales in a post-apocalyptic Melbourne—reboot Raymond Chandler for the twenty-first century, critiquing toxic masculinity and poking fun at the tired tropes of the tawdry PI genre along the way. At least that’s what it says on the label.
You can read an extract from ‘Blue Swirls’ here.
PRESS RELEASE
The Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award longlist announced
Eleven finalists have been announced by renowned Australian author Carmel Bird in the first year of the Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award.
Launched at the State Library Victoria in December 2017, The Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award showcases new works of short fiction from Australian and overseas writers. The longlist was judged from a field of over 130 submissions, including short story collections as well as novellas, many of which included digital narratives with multimedia elements.
Carmel Bird was pleased with the diversity of entries to the award: “I was surprised and delighted to see the large number of entries, coming from a great range of writers, some of whom were unpublished, many of whom were students in writing courses, and others who were established writers.”
“It was fascinating to observe what was a kind of broad snapshot of the thinking and practice of fiction-writing in Australia today. The energy of so much of the work, the range of subject-matter, and the confidence in the use of language and form were a source of great pleasure,” Ms Bird said.
Finalists in the 2018 Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award will be showcased by State Library Victoria via the online platform, Tablo. Visitors to Library’s Tablo page will be able to read and respond to an extract from each submission. The three winning entrants will receive cash prizes totalling $5000 as well as publishing agreements with Spineless Wonders. The winners will be announced in September.
Justine Hyde, State Library Victoria’s Director of Library Services and Experience, said the Library was always looking for new ways to shine a light on digital writing: “The Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award is a great way for us to highlight talented and creative authors who bring together the literary and digital worlds. We are thrilled to support this award in unearthing innovative and exciting new digital work.”
The longlisted entries are:
Ashley Kalagian Blunt, Flicker of Justice, No More
Craig Cormick, Everybody Loves a Good Cook Book
Susie Greenhill, Maps for the Lost
Mel Hall, Goodbye Tom Morrow
William Lane, Small Forest
Catherine Moffat, Remnants of Sound
Ruairi Murphy, Two Sets of Books
Arna Radovich, Mosaic of Loss
Bronwyn Rodden, Darkness
Guy Salvidge, The Dying Rain – And Other Forays into the Bramble Noir
Beth Spencer, The Age of Fibs
The Great Unknown is out and about!
Twilight-Zone themed anthology The Great Unknown, edited by Angela Meyer and published by Spineless Wonders, is out and has already received some great reviews (see below). Including stories by great authors like Krissy Kneen, P. M. Newton, Mark O’Flynn and Deborah Biancotti, the collection also features the literary debut of Carmel Bird Award winner Alex Cothren and five other writers (myself included) whose stories were shortlisted for the award. My contributor copies arrived today and they look beautiful. The Great Unknown is available from physical bookstores like Readings and all the usual online haunts. Don’t forget to add it on Goodreads too.
Kylie Mason of The Newtown Review of Books has some kind words for the anthology, and you can find other reviews here and here. Finally, you can read Angela Meyer’s thoughts on putting the anthology together on the Readings blog. Phew, that’s a lot of links. I’m looking forward to getting stuck into reading The Great Unknown myself, so I’m probably have something more substantive to say about it in a week or two.
Interview with Angela Meyer, editor of The Great Unknown
The Great Unknown authors: Guy Salvidge
This is the sixth post published in conjunction with the release of The Great Unknown this month, where authors share their experience of writing eerie stories for the anthology, and give you an idea of what to expect (and, I hope, look forward to). The Great Unknown is available to pre-order from Booktopia, Readings, Fishpond (free shipping worldwide) and all good bookstores. You might also want to add it to your shelves on Goodreads.
Guy Salvidge’s speculative neo-noir story ‘A Void’ was shortlisted for the Carmel Bird Short Fiction Award. Salvidge’s latest novel is Yellowcake Summer and he has a great blog: Wrapped up in Books.
What did you enjoy/find challenging about writing to this particular theme?
As soon as I saw the guidelines for this competition, I was determined to enter. I often struggle to write stories for specific themes, but this one appealed to me for a number of reasons. Short fiction competitions often have very stringent word limits of 3000 words or less, which is a stricture I often struggle with, but I (just) managed to cram what I wanted to cram into 4000 words here. While no aficionado of The Twilight Zone (see below), I am a longtime reader and writer of speculative and slipstream fiction and thus I was well within my comfort zone in writing for this theme. I also enjoy writing about Melbourne, a city I’ve visited many times but never lived in, and so I enjoyed deploying some of my favourite places in Melbourne in ‘A Void’.
Tell us about your story in The Great Unknown.
‘A Void’ is the third in an ongoing series of stories featuring Tyler Bramble, an alcoholic and sometimes suicidal detective (or Seeker) living in a near future Melbourne. The first of these stories, ‘The Dying Rain’, was written at the request of Andrez Bergen, who was putting together a spin-off anthology set in the universe of his debut novel Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat. I ended up co-editing that anthology with Andrez, and the book, The Tobacco-Stained Sky, has recently been released by US publisher Another Sky Press. I enjoying writing ‘The Dying Rain’ so much that I wrote a second Tyler Bramble mystery, ‘Blue Swirls’, which appeared earlier this year in the first issue of Tincture Journal. Here, in Tyler’s third adventure, he must contend with the unintended side effects of the drug ‘Void’ and a frigid Melbourne day that starts poorly and goes downhill from there.
What memories do you have of watching The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits or of reading spooky/uncanny stories (or comics) as a kid? Did these play any role in your developing imagination? Which films, TV shows, books etc provide that same sort of allure for you these days?
Confession time: I’ve never watched an episode of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits! I didn’t let that dissuade me, however. As a (somewhat disturbed) child I used to watch The X-Files and the ‘true story’ show The Extraordinary that followed directly after. At that age (twelve or thirteen) I was obsessed with cheerful topics like nuclear fallout and the prophecies of Nostradamus. From the age of eighteen, I fell in love with the work of American SF writer Philip K. Dick, who charted territory in novels like Ubik and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch similar to that that I’ve explored in ‘A Void’. J. G. Ballard is another major influence. His stories, such as ‘The Voices of Time’, as well as novels like The Atrocity Exhibition and The Unlimited Dream Company, helped to expand my own mental horizons as both a reader and writer.
What thoughts do you have on the current status of genre fiction?
I do think that certain genres are considered more prestigious and highbrow than others. For most of my life I have been writing some mutant variant of science fiction that is a recognisable descendant of the works of writers like Dick and Ballard. I have realised lately, however, that science fiction novels are very much a niche market in today’s publishing landscape. In response to this, I have quite consciously decided to change genres (in my case to crime fiction) to potentially reach a larger audience. This is a pity, because while I do enjoy reading and writing crime (such as the novels of Raymond Chandler, Megan Abbott and Daniel Woodrell) my first love is for fantastical fiction by writers like William S. Burroughs, John Crowley and Ursula Le Guin.
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“A Void” shortlisted in 2013 Carmel Bird Award and will be published in The Great Unknown
Some more great news: my Twilight-Zone themed story “A Void” has been selected by competition judge Angela Meyer as one of six stories shortlisted for the 2013 Carmel Bird Award. “A Void” is my third story set in the universe of Andrez Bergen’s Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat, following on from “The Dying Rain” (published in The Tobacco-Stained Sky) and “Blue Swirls (published in Tincture Journal #1). The prize for being shortlisted is inclusion in the upcoming short fiction anthology The Great Unknown, edited by Angela Meyer and published by Spineless Wonders. So I’m very pleased!
Guy Salvidge 