AustLit logo
Keith Stevenson Keith Stevenson i(A68403 works by)
Born: Established: 1962 Glasgow,
c
Scotland,
c
c
United Kingdom (UK),
c
Western Europe, Europe,
;
Gender: Male
Arrived in Australia: 1988
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

BiographyHistory

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].

Most Referenced Works

Awards for Works

y separately published work icon Dimension6 : Annual Collection 2017 Australia : Coeur de Lion , 2017 12896919 2017 anthology short story
2017 shortlisted Aurealis Awards for Excellence in Australian Speculative Fiction Anthology Division
y separately published work icon X6 : A Novellanthology Croydon Park : Coeur de Lion , 2009 Z1661028 2009 anthology novella fantasy horror science fiction

Six writers: no rules. Six journeys beyond the borders of the real. The Unknown raised to the sixth power (publisher's blurb).

X6 is a collection of novella-length journeys beyond the borders of the real from six of the most exciting speculative fiction authors working in Australia today - Margo Lanagan, Terry Dowlng, Cat Sparks, Paul Haines, Trent Jamieson and Louise Katz.

2009 shortlisted Aurealis Awards for Excellence in Australian Speculative Fiction Anthology Division
y separately published work icon Cock : Adventures in Masculinity Melbourne : Coeur de Lion , 2006 Z1323776 2006 anthology short story

'Cock is an anthology of stories that question and problematise the male perspective from within.

'There's a heavy dose of irony in our use of the word Cock in the title. The male viewpoint is the dominant one in Western culture, and to speak as white and male is to occupy a position of power.

'This is not a 'men's movement' project, nor is it a backlash against feminism. It doesn't aim to redress some kind of perceived imbalance in representations of men. That's why we felt it was important it should also be open to women writers.

'Cock is an attempt to look at a theme that doesn't really get much attention in the mainstream, despite the fact that the male perspective, the male gaze, is the dominant, defining and default position in our cultural products.

'And in fact, one of the effects of this dominance is that maleness gets reduced, and simplified, and over-determined. We start to take for granted that we know what it means. We start to lose sight of other possibilities for masculinity.

'So we wanted to do a project that would mess with that, and hopefully shift around and overlay some different meanings about what it is to be male.Cock is a genuine attempt to interrogate masculinity. And hopefully you'll enjoy the fruits of our labour.'

Source: Anthology website: http://www.cock-anthology.com/about.html
Sighted: 10/40/2007

2007 shortlisted Ditmar Awards Best Collected Work
Last amended 27 Nov 2014 09:52:58
See Also
Other mentions of "" in AustLit:
    X