Celebrating Christchurch’s Sir Julius Vogel Award Finalists: Shelley Chappell & Tim Stead
This coming Saturday, I’ll be giving the keynote address at an event to celebrate Christchurch’s Sir Julius Vogel Award finalists and winners.
Today, I’d like to shine the spotlight on the two finalists, Shelley Chappell & Tim Stead.
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About Shelley Chappell:
- Finalist: Best Novella Category for Ranpasatusan
- Finalist: Best Collected Work for Beyond The Briar (2014)
- Finalist: Best New Talent Award
Born and raised in Christchurch, Shelley graduated with a PhD in children’s and young adult fantasy literature from Macquarie University in Sydney. Over the last year, Shelley has published numerous short stories in a wide variety of anthologies, from Cole’s Christmas Spirit, the story of a British boy and his wilted Christmas spirit in The Best Of Twisty Christmas Tales (Editors: Peter Friend, Eileen Mueller & A.J.Ponder, 2014) to Trash Monsters, a science fiction short story for middle-grade readers, published in the e-zine, Spaceports and Spidersilk, edited by Marcie Tentchoff (2015.) Shelley’s first collection of Romantic Fairy Tales, Beyond the Briar, was also published in 2014.
Excerpt from Shelley’s Work:
“At night, when the cool wind captures grains of sand and tosses them from hand to hand like a travelling entertainer, the desert is dark, and there is no-one to see the dust dervishes. The silence is profound. Nothing whispers but the wind. Sand shifts, turns and tumbles, dances across dunes, drifts soft as shed feathers through the night, blown where the wind chooses.”
From: © Stars on Dark Water – published in Beyond the Briar (2014)
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About Tim Stead:
- Finalist: Best Novel for The Seventh Friend, Book 1 of the Sparrow and the Wolf trilogy
- Finalist: Best New Talent Award
Born in the UK, Tim currently resides in rural Canterbury, within sight of the Southern Alps. He published the high fantasy trilogy, the Sparrow and the Wolf, which he describes as inspired by the late Roger Zelazny, in April 2014 and has a further three novels forthcoming.
Excerpt from Tim’s Work:
“The ruins were older than the kingdoms of men. What remained, and even what remained upright was still impressive. The place was called Hellaree, and it was said that the last great mage emperor had made his stronghold here, a mass of dark stone climbing up the eastern slopes of the Dragon’s Back, but the tales were nearly as ancient as the stones themselves, and just as reshaped by time, worn by a hundred generations of tongues. The stones of a dozen great towers had fallen, making the slopes below a scree of cut stone, now weathered back to nature’s shapes by frost and wind and rain.”
From: © The Seventh Friend, 2014
I love “Beyond the Briar”, such wonderfully imaginative stories!!