These posts always feel weird as hell, but here goes anyway.
I managed to get a few things out in the world in 2021 that would be eligible for nomination in awards like the Sir Julius Vogel Awards, Hugo Awards, and Nebula Awards and I’ve listed them below.
If you’re interested in NZ works and nominating for the Sir Julius Vogels, please also go check out the crowd-sourced spreadsheet I collate of all the eligible works I’m aware of here. Anyone, anywhere in the world can nominate as many NZ works from 2021 as they like. The nomination form is here.
Short Stories
If I had to pick one of my works from 2021 to direct people to it would be my creepy cli-fi short story told in remote learning instructions from a teacher to her student ‘Data Migration’ published by Strange Horizons in July 2021 and free to read through the link. I was super proud to finally make it into such an awesome market and it was favourably reviewed by Maria Haskins and Charles Payseur as well as featuring in Tor.com’s ‘Must-read speculative fiction: July 2021’
For completeness, the following original short stories of mine were also published in 2021:
‘Between the Lines’, Midnight Echo 16, Australasian Horror Writers Association Magazine, [November 2021] Acrostic Story - Horror
‘Irony’, ‘Retouched’, and ‘The Enemy Within’, which all appeared in my collection Alt-ernate
Novella
I published my Witchy Fiction Novella Against the Grain in June. It was selected to be part of Book Coven, a book club partnership between Pantograph Punch and Verb Wellington, I was invited to speak at the Verb Festival about it, and I had a couple of related non-fiction articles published that resulted in my invitation to become an ambassador for Coeliac New Zealand.
Collected Work
My debut collection Alt-ernate was a celebration of my fifth anniversary of writing, featuring 37 speculative stories ranging from micro-fiction to novelette length.
Other people’s stuff
Like I said at the start, you should totally go check out the spreadsheet of eligible NZ works.
For novels, I would highly recommend The King of Faerie by AJ Lancaster, book 4 of the Stariel Series and a wonderful Fantasy of Manners and Butcherbird by Cassie Hart which is a rural New Zealand Supernatural Suspense.
While I haven’t found the time to read them yet, in the Children’s fiction space I am most looking forward to reading Graci Kim’s Last Fallen Star and Steph Matuku’s Falling into Rarohenga (which my son loved).
And if you want to read an awesome collection, you can’t go past Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy Volume 3 from Paper Road Press, which I was honoured to have two stories in this year alongside so many other wonderful writers.
Happy Reading!