The 2026 calendar of Australian literary events is up!
There is already a healthy listing, especially in the first half of they year, with the big question being: will Bendigo Writers Festival bounce back from this year’s kerfuffle?
The calendar is slightly more streamlined this year, with events yet to be confirmed listed at the bottom.
As always, please feel free to get in touch to bring events to my attention or alert me to errors.
Given I’m not the most prolific of writers, it does mean a great deal when one of my sporadic publications gets nominated for an award. So a toast to Cruel Nights, and moreso to those fans who cared enough to get it onto the ballot in the ‘best novella’ category in the Ditmar awards.
The Ditmars are nominated and awarded by popular vote (the latter restricted to members of various conventions), so it was great to see the novella make the cut alongside some seriously heavy hitters in the genre field, being:
‘Shattered’ by Pauline Yates
‘The Emporium’ by Kaaron Warren
‘Wilder’ by Pamela Jeffs
‘Ghost of the Neon God’ by T. R. Napper
‘Maleficium’ by Kyla Lee Ward.
The winner will be announced at Conflux, Canberra’s speculative fiction convention, in October.
The full list of finalists is at the Conflux website.
It’s worth mentioning that it’s a bunch of volunteers who make conventions and awards happen. They should take a bow for pumping this energy into the scene.
Today marks the official release day of Into the Cthulhu-Universe, an IFWG anthology that transplants Lovecraft’s mythos into other literary realms.
My short story, ‘Sweet Music’, came out of the blue, or more likely the black: a casual conversation with co-editor Steven Paulsen in which it was mentioned there was a hole in the anthology.
‘Anyone done Dracula?’ I asked.
‘No.’ Eyebrow raised.
‘Give me a week, see if anything emerges…’
And here it is, a little different to the original concept that first dug its way out of the back brain.
You’ll notice some of the hard-copy research material pictured, the exquisite coincidence of a certain Cthulhu castle in Transylvania, the challenge of layering Tepes over Stoker over Lovecraft et al.
I’ve written only two other Cthulhu-esque stories — ‘An Incident at Portsea, 1967’ and ‘Slither’. Nice when things come in threes, even if years apart!
Into the Cthulhu-Universe is now available from the usual online retailers. Find out more at IFWG.
The calendar of Australian literary events is up!
As always, please feel free to get in touch to bring events to my attention or alert me to errors.
The calendar of Australian literary events is starting to populate, with more than 20 on the list already, up until August so far. Adelaide Writers Week is well ahead, having posted dates for 2026 as well!
Next year’s events are still listed under the 2024 calendar – they’ll get their own page in late November.
As always, please feel free to get in touch to bring events to my attention or alert me to errors.
It is a two-vampire-story year, with a short story following hot on the heels of my novella, Cruel Nights.
Sounds like a good reason for a party! Friday the 13th? Even better!
Nosferatu Unbound invites an international cast of writers to revisit the world of its namesake, the marvellous 1922 film.
As it happens, co-editor Steven Paulsen, illustrator Dillon Naylor and a certain Kirstyn McDermott are all fellow Ballaratians (or perhaps more fittingly, Ballarodents), hence: party!
Nosferatu Unbound will be celebrated at a release party, part of Collins Booksellers’ After Dark series, on 13 September at Collins Booksellers in Bridge St Mall, Ballarat, kicking off at 6.30pm. Also on the table will be Cruel Nights, still waiting for its official raising of the glass since its May release. There will be minimal official words, mocktails with a vampiric flavour, and books to buy, get signed, and chat about: as well as the anthology and Cruel Nights, Dillon’s fabulous vampire yarn Batrisha, and more dark tales from the four contributors.
There is a Facebook event to indicate your interest for catering purposes, or drop me or the bookstore a line.
As a further local connection, my story, ‘The Late Stage’, ships the undead off to Ballarat during the gold rush – not all gold diggers are after money, are they?
Kirstyn, meanwhile, has a familiar character of her own hot on the trail of the movie itself. Ooh!
Nosferatu Unbound is officially released on 16 September – keep an eye on the publisher’s website for purchase options.
Ever since I first heard the Brigade album by Heart, sometime around 1990, I reckoned there was a story in it. Not just the micro stories of each song, but a bigger narrative.
I wrote a short one, melding tracks All I Wanna Do (Is Make Love to You) and The Night*. Didn’t much like it, too simplistic, one note. It’s still in the drawer.
Then, in 2019, emerging from four years of PhD in climate change fiction, I felt ready to take a shot at a longer treatment of the Brigade project. But wait. Just around the corner, in March 2020, the Queensland Writers Centre was having a weekend novel-writing ‘boot camp’ with Kim Wilkins. Perfect. Stop writing, get some ideas together, work on something else to fill in the time**.
(Kim, by the way, ran the first QWC workshop I attended after I moved to Brisbane in 1998. It’s where I met my tribe. To a large extent, that workshop set me on this path.)
Brigade, Kim reckoned, probably wasn’t Heart’s best album, when I said during our introductions that my project for the weekend had been inspired by it. I was too slow to add that it might not be their most lauded, but it is the one with the vampire!
It was a fun weekend, bouncing around story ideas and character arcs with each other, emerging weary but also energised, with a note book full of trajectories and ideas that lit a fire under the project. Needless to say, I played a lot of Heart writing the book, especially Brigade, tapping the moods and themes. Cruel Nights (yep, from a song on the album) is still anchored around the meshing of those two key songs, but the entire album is in there.
I did check in with the rights holders about using a stanza for an epigraph*** but it was a bit pricey for this project. Still, I like the compromise of using Heart song titles as chapter headings. Picking appropriate ones from across the catalogue reminded me again of how diverse and accomplished this band is, what a set of pipes Ann Wilson has.
So yes, the long wait between books is finally over, and yes, it’s another vampire story. Also a kind of love song. With Heart.
* funnily enough, All I Wanna Do is not one of my favourite Heart tunes. The Night, it’s right up there, though.
** still working on it.
*** there are some lyrical Easter eggs in the text, but I had to wrap them carefully to avoid any copyright issues.
I’m very pleased to share the news that I have a new book coming out! The novella Cruel Nights is slated for release through Brisbane’s Brain Jar Press on 21 May 2024.
Says the publisher: Brain Jar Press is pleased to present Jason Nahrung’s Cruel Nights, a vampire novella which harks back to the vampire novels of Poppy Z. Brite and Anne Rice while also asking what might have happened to those characters once the nineties were over. It’s an extraordinary read for anyone with fond memories of the grunge era and the horror which sprang up around it.
And the blurb:
…a grunge-soaked tale of love and vampirism in ’90s Seattle.
Charlie died in Nevada, 1973, after seeing Led Zeppelin live on stage and making the wrong choice on the long drive home.
Corey meets him at a TAD gig seventeen years later and feels an immediate attraction. They both swear their night together will be a onetime thing, but neither can stay away.
Corey and Charlie spend two decades building a life together, a mortal and vampire in love, but there are some things Corey’s not willing to give up. She can move cities when Charlie’s eternal youth raises suspicion and she can rebuild her career as a music journalist after every disruption to their life, but as she gets older, it’s harder and harder to be satisfied with their nocturnal existence.
Then a moment of weakness delivers Charlie and Corey the one thing they never expected to have…and their relationship gets more complicated than either of them ever dreamed.
Find out more at Brain Jar Press
The ebook version of Oz Is Burning is now available, with a print version to follow.
The anthology, from B Cubed Press, is centred on Australia’s horror bushfire period of 2019-20, and supports wildlife charity WIRES.
The book features stories and poems ranging from the darker side to the optimistic, and some leaven the volume with touches of humour, too. No prizes for guessing where my ‘Wollemi Dreaming’ falls in that spectrum.
Here’s the full table of contents:
And Gaia Screams by Ann Poore
Across the Ditch by Clare Rhoden
Burn, Burn! by Almas Alexander
Red Sky at Morning by Sue Bursztynski
Fires of the Heart by E.E. King
Pay Back by Alex Isle
By the Grace of God by Harold Gross
Should Fire Remember the Fuel by Kyla Lee Ward
Welcoming the End by Aura Redwood
Beef by Zena Shapter
The Last Wish by Lauren E. Mitchell
Wollemi Dreaming by Jason Nahrung
Firestorm Sounds by Suzanne Newnham
Red Sky, Blue Dream by Jack Dann
Infestation by Paula Boer
Writing on the Wall by Gillian Polack
Dire Insurance by Jared Kavanaugh
Divorce by Donna J.W. Munro
Inconvenient Visitor by Lucy Sussex
Burning Hearts by Eleanor Whitworth
Harvest by Narrelle M. Harris
A Town Called Hope by Silvia Brown
The calendar of Australian literary events is piling up with cancellations and postponements due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but numerous writing organisations are heading online to keep the words flowing and the connections intact.
I’ve listed festivals offering online programming at the top of the calendar as well as in chronological order, and I’m curating a page at Ballarat Writers listing activities available online, such as joining in spoken word and poetry gigs, tuning in to award ceremonies, and listening to readings.
Please share recommendations here.