Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia, and has been writing or telling stories for as long as she remembers. Raised on a cattle station, she began writing fantasy fiction after a couple of years overseas when she rediscovered Australian landscapes. Living back in the bush, she also had a refresher course in horses, cattle, and other staples of high fantasy fiction, and her first fantasy series was set in a world modelled on Australian settings. She likes to write about the morality of using magic, as well as war, dragons, and improbable love affairs. Her first fantasy series began with Everran’s Bane in 2005, followed by The Moving Water, The Red Country, and now The Seagull. The Moving Water was shortlisted for best fantasy novel in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards.
The Everran series is almost moral sword-and-sorcery. The Amberlight series verges on science fiction. It’s about a mystery, not quite magic, not quite science, and the power of transformation it unleashed in its world. Amberlight was also a best Australian fantasy novel finalist, followed by Riversend and Source, and she is currently thinking of possible publishers for the fourth book, Dragonfly.
Kelso’s most recent novel release began with an apparent ghost who walked out of a lift (elevator) floor and put a goldminer’s panning dish down on the heroine’s head. It became The Solitaire Ghost and The Time Seam, Books 1 and 2 of Blackston Gold, a contemporary North Queensland fantasy that is also an alternate history and a time romance.
Three of Kelso’s poems were published in a mid-1970’s anthology of Australian Women’s poetry, and her poetry has also appeared in LiNQ, where at various times she has been a fiction editor. Her short fiction includes stories published in Antipodes: A Journal of Australian and New Zealand Literature, the online e-zine Luna Station Quarterly and several anthologies, including Neverlands and Otherwheres, New Ceres Nights, Beyond Grimm, Gears and Levers 3, and Griots II: Sisters of the Spear.
Kelso is currently an adjunct lecture at James Cook University in Townsville, where she has taught English Literature, Popular Culture subjects, and Creative Writing. She has a Ph.D. on the interaction of feminism with modern Gothic and science fiction, and an MA in Creative Writing. Her critical essays have appeared in Science-Fiction Studies, Foundation, the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Para.Doxa: Studies in World Literature, and The New York Review of Science Fiction. She guest edited a volume of new work on Ursula K. LeGuin for Paradoxa in 2008,. Her other academic publications include a monograph on Sheri S. Tepper and a collection of her critical work, Three Observations and a Dialogue: Around and About SF. She is currently a consulting board member for Para.Doxa, and a board member for Femspec.
Kelso’s most recent publication is “Spring in Geneva,” a 25K word novella riff on Frankenstein, which involves Mary Shelley, a young Swiss banker, Lord Byron from a different perspective, and at least two mysterious persons named “William.”
“In telling this tale, I begin at my own beginning: that first glimpse of the Promethean, one bitter cold morning in the Parc des Bastions, trying, as I thought, to eat the hyacinths.”
Released in October 2013 from Aqueduct Press, ISBN-10: 1619760444 ISBN-13: 978-1619760448.