Lisa L Hannett is based in Adelaide, South Australia. She used to feel weird speaking about herself in the third person but has learned to embrace this convention: it makes a fair bit of sense, she’s realised, considering she often feels like several different people.
In an earlier life, Lisa lived in Canada where she earned an Honours degree in Fine Arts (majoring in painting and photography). Nowadays, she uses 10% of the things she learned during the course of these studies doing graphic design work for university academics in Adelaide. Occasionally, she designs fun things like book jackets.
Another version of Lisa earned an Honours degree in English in South Australia. Subsequently, this part of her personality got it into her head that doing a PhD in medieval Icelandic literature (of all things!) would be a good idea. So in 2005 she began this immense task, and it is still in progress. (We don’t talk to her about this much, for fear of upsetting her). One day, this Lisa would like to finish her thesis and snag a job in academia, which will have two immediate benefits: someone else will have to do graphic design work for her projects, and she will have a real income to fund her writing.
The Lisa you’re here to see is a writer of speculative fiction, largely of the creepy or unsettling variety. Her short stories have appeared in venues including Clarkesworld Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, ChiZine, Midnight Echo, and she’s got works forthcoming in Electric Velocipede, Tesseracts 14, Shimmer and Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s Steampunk Reloaded, among other places. Her story ‘On the Lot and In the Air’ was recommended on Locus’s Recommended Reading List for 2009. She is a graduate of Clarion South.
Her first collection of short stories, Bluegrass Symphony, will be published by Ticonderoga Publications in 2011. It deals with cowboys and fallow fields, shapeshifters and rednecks, superstitions and realities in harsh prairie country — and a whole bunch of other things thrown in the mix.
Currently, Lisa is working on another short story collection, Lament for the Afterworld. This book is a pseudo-steampunk compilation of interconnected stories, set in the same world as ‘The Good Window’ (published in Fantasy) and centring on themes of belief and war. And because this Lisa has no concept of time restrictions, and is apparently accustomed to existing on very little sleep, she is also working on two novels. The first revolves around witches and can only be described as Puritan steampunk with a splash of RL Stevenson; the second is a romp through the underworld (can one ‘romp’ through the underworld, you ask? Here’s hoping) and is tentatively called Steam.
Undoubtedly, these works will be categorised as ‘Dark Fantasy’ or ‘Horror’, which is hilarious considering all versions of Lisa are afraid of the dark.
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