Helen Marshall Helen Marshall i(19671067 works by)
Born: Established: 1983
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Canada,
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Americas, ;
Gender: Female
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BiographyHistory

Dr Helen Marshall joined The University of Queensland as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing after completing a PhD with the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford, researching literature written during the Black Death. Her short fiction has won a range of awards, including the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her debut novel, The Migration, was released in 2019, and followed the consequences of a mysterious plague.

In 2023, she published a collection of critical writing on the evolution of writing, horror, and weird fiction; it focused on international authors such as M. John Harrison, Stephen King, and Kelly Link.

Most Referenced Works

Awards for Works

Science Fiction for Hire? Notes Towards an Emerging Practice of Creative Futurism 2023 single work essay
— Appears in: TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs , October vol. 27 no. 2 2023; 'This article introduces the term creative futurism to distinguish a type of speculative writing from traditional creative writing practices, specifically those of science fiction. Creative futurism is not a clearly defined field or method of practice but rather a loose array of approaches, examples and contexts, often involving collaborations between writers and stakeholders from other fields. We define it as work which is futures- oriented, uses elements of the traditional creative writing skillset, but is constrained by an additional set of parameters (their purpose, context and requirements). To support this definition, science fiction author Joanne Anderton discusses her experience writing creative, near-future scenarios about the deployment of drones for Trusted Autonomous Systems (a kind of creative futurism in practice). She outlines how she and her stakeholders conceptualised the writing and how she applied traditional creative writing skills within this context. Building upon this, author and critic Kathleen Jennings identifies aesthetic features of traditionally published examples of creative futurism: its heightened focus on technology, its realist-rationalist tone, and the resulting subordination of other aspects of craft such as characterisation. We conclude by discussing aspects of writing practice that might be applied in the future to energise this new form of writing.' (Publication abstract) 
2023 winner Aurealis Awards for Excellence in Australian Speculative Fiction — Peter McNamara Convenors' Award
y separately published work icon The Gold Leaf Executions United Kingdom (UK) : Unsung Stories , 2023 25747751 2023 selected work short story

'There was a way of killing people you told me about. You found it in a book, an old one: gilded edges and a cracked spine, boards that had warped like the hull of a ship.

'A young boy takes up the Egyptian art of embalming to win the girl of his dreams. Four devils play knucklebones, as they search for a way out of Hell.

'In these stories the dead turn up in unexpected places: buried in the walls of newbuilds, washed up on deserted riverbanks, housed in the carcass of a giant sea creature, flung from bridges only to return to their homes, asking for cream and sugar with their coffee. All the while, the living search for ways to hold onto their happiness, knowing how thin the boundary is between their place and the next.

'By turns poignant, surprising and darkly funny, World Fantasy Award-winner Helen Marshall crosses the territory of ancient stories, fairy tales and urban legends in search of new myths for the troubled times we live in.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.
2023 finalist Aurealis Awards for Excellence in Australian Speculative Fiction — Best Collection
VIEW ALL AWARDS
Last amended 14 Mar 2024 13:30:47
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