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Cat Sparks Cat Sparks i(A72459 works by) (a.k.a. Catriona Sparks)
Born: Established: 1965 Sydney, New South Wales, ;
Gender: Female
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BiographyHistory

With a BA in Visual Arts, Cat Sparks initially pursued a career as a graphic artist and photographer. After winning a Bulletin magazine photography competition (the prize being a trip to Paris), she was later appointed official photographer for two New South Wales premiers and engaged as photographer on three archaeological expeditions to Jordan. Sparks also won an Australian Science Fiction Achievement Awards for her artwork for the robot collage Cyberchick.

In the mid-late 1990s, Sparks began to develop an interest in writing, particularly in the speculative fiction genres. By the early 2000s, she had moved to Wollongong, where she and her partner, writer Robert Hood, set up the independent publishing company Agog! Press. The pair oversaw the release of ten anthologies between 2002 and 2008, at which time they closed Agog! down in order to concentrate on their individual writing projects.

A graduate of the inaugural Clarion South Writers' Workshop (Queensland) in 2004, Sparks has gone on to publish more than forty-five stories since 2000. Her first major award was the 2002 Ditmar Award (formerly the Australian Science Fiction Achievement Awards) for Best New Talent . After being nominated in 2002 for the Aurealis Peter MacNamara Conveners Award for services to the Australian science-fiction publishing industry, Sparks won the award in 2004. That same year, she also won third prize in the first quarter of the Writers of the Future competition. In all, Sparks has won more than ten awards for her stories since 2002, making her one of Australia's leading writers of speculative fiction.

Sparks has travelled widely throughout her life, including such destinations as Europe, the Middle East, Indonesia, the South Pacific, Mexico, and the lower states of North America.

Most Referenced Works

Notes

  • Further Reference:

Personal Awards

2014 shortlisted Ditmar Awards Best Artwork For the cover art for The Bride Price
2011 Australia Council Literature Board Grants Grants for Emerging Writers $25,000 for young adult literature writing.
2005 shortlisted Ditmar Awards Best Achievement 'for editing and writing including winning third place in the writers of the future award'.

Awards for Works

Hacking Santorini 2020 single work short story
— Appears in: Dark Harvest 2020;
2021 shortlisted Ditmar Awards Best Short Story
y separately published work icon Dark Harvest England : NewCon Press , 2020 19689020 2020 selected work short story

'Multiple award-winning author Cat Sparks writes science fiction with a distinctly Australian flavour – stories steeped in the desperate anarchy of Mad Max futures, redolent with scorching sun and the harshness of desert sands, but her narratives reach deeper than that. In her tales of ordinary people adapting to post-apocalyptic futures, she casts a light on what it means to be human; the good and the bad, the noble and the shameful.

'Dark Harvest gathers together Cat’s best short fiction of recent years, as selected by the author herself: fourteen stories, two of them novelettes, including one brand new tale and two Ditmar Award winners.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

2021 winner Ditmar Awards Best Collected Work
2020 finalist Aurealis Awards for Excellence in Australian Speculative Fiction Best Collection
You Will Remember Who You Were 2019 single work short story science fiction
— Appears in: Dimension6 , no. 16 2019;
2019 shortlisted Aurealis Awards for Excellence in Australian Speculative Fiction Science Fiction Division Novella
Last amended 26 Jun 2014 13:51:42
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