Cirrus@Austlit

After attending Burnside Primary School and Hutchesons' Grammar School, Keith Stevenson then went to Glasgow University where he was awarded an MA (Hons) in Drama and Philosophy. His early working life was in community arts, firstly as a drama worker in Newarthill, then as supervisor of the Maryhill Arts Centre and finally as coordinator of the Easterhouse Arts Project which received major funding from the Glasgow City Council as part of the 1990 European City of Culture celebrations.

Stevenson first came to Australia in 1988, backpacking around the country and finally settling in Melbourne. He returned to Glasgow to work in Easterhouse for a period before becoming a permanent Australian resident. He was interested in science fiction at an early age, reading as much as he could find, especially Asimov, Niven and Dick. He remembers what first appealed to him about science fiction: 'I must have been about 8 or 9 and I read in a junior encyclopedia that the sun would one day go nova and planet Earth would be destroyed. The book pointed out that this wouldn't happen for billions of years, but that didn't mean much to a child. I was inconsolable for days. And then I found a science fiction book and I realised that humanity could survive the death of the sun if we escaped to other planets. SF gave me a message of hope and it's that message which still fires my imagination today - that humanity will survive, however altered.'

In Melbourne Stevenson worked in the public service, but he quickly got involved in the local speculative fiction scene, meeting Dirk Strasser (q.v.) at a TAFE course on science fiction and fantasy writing. Strasser told him about Aurealis, a magazine for which Stevenson assumed publication responsibility from 2001 to the end of 2004. He was also organising convenor of the Aurealis Awards for a number of years before they came under the auspices of Fantastic Queensland. During that time he also wrote a science fiction novel, Horizon, and had two short stories published. He has been working on a multi-book space opera called The Way of The Kresh. Stevenson is a member of SuperNOVA, the Melbourne-based speculative fiction writers' group. In 2006, he and fellow SuperNOVA writer Andrew Macrae (q.v.) launched 'coeur de lion', a speculative fiction publishing imprint, and with it their first anthology, c0ck, a collection of original stories interrogating masculinity within a speculative fiction framework. In October 2007 coeur de lion published Rynemonn, the conclusion to the Tom Rynosseros stories from Terry Dowling (q.v.). A further speculative fiction anthology is scheduled for a 2008 publication date. Stevenson recently became science fiction and horror reviewer for Aurealis and now lives in Sydney [2008].