Writers

a-z of transportation writers & editors

 

Robbie Arnott is the author of Flames. In 2015 he won the Tasmanian Young Writers’ Fellowship, and in 2014 he won the Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers. His writing has been widely published throughout Australia, including in the second edition of Transportation. He lives in Hobart.

 

 

Nazil Artemia is originally from Iran and immigrated to the United States less than a decade ago. She holds an MFA in creative writing and has worked as a fiction editor and Persian translator with several local magazine in the United States. She is currently working on her first novel.

 

Will Ashon was the founder of the record label Big Dada Recordings, which he ran for over fifteen years, signing acts like Roots Manuva, Wiley, Diplo, Kate Tempest and Young Fathers and, in the process, winning the Mercury Music Prize twice. He has published two novels with Faber & Faber, Clear Water and The Heritage, and a third book Strange Labyrinth with Granta Books.

 

Farhad Barbaei was born in Tehran, in 1977. His first book Her Lover Israel, a collection of short stories, was published in 2005 by Bon-gah Publishing. He wrote three novels between 2008 and 2011-Tower(2008), Jamming(2009), and Disintegration (2011), all of which where denied publication in Iran due to teavu censorship. They were eventually published in the UK by H&S Media. His last novel Mr. Shahpour Gerauoli With Family Was published in Iran. He currently lives in Tehran

 

Michael Blake is a writer from Tasmania. He has twice been shortlisted for the Young Writer’s Fellowship at the Premier’s Literary Prizes, and is currently at work on a novel.

 

Jamie Collinson is a writer from Leeds, former inhabitant of London, and now resident of Los Angeles. His fiction has been published by the Pigeonhole, as part of their Sex Starves collection, and by Open Pen. He has written about books and music for the guardian.com

Martin Cornwell’s short stories have appeared in various places online and in anthologies in the UK, Australia and North America. He’s written one full-length novel, a speculative crime story called The Seers, and is now working on a second novel, tentatively titled The Common Place. He lives in London.

 

Kate Ellis is a London based writer. Her work has been published by Open Pen and been featured in The Wireless Reader. Her story ’55’ was short listed for the Myriad Editions Writers Retreat Competition. When she is not writing, or reading, Kate makes prints, paints and sells books.

 

Rachel Edwards is the editor in chief of Transportation Press. A writer herself, she has been published in The Australian, The Mercury, Crikey and Island. and she is a regular guest on ABC Radio in Tasmania and nationally, discussing books and writing. She was the host of the long running Book Show on Edge Radio, in the guise of Paige Turner. She is a former editor of Island magazine and guest-edited a volume of the Review of Australian Fiction which featured Tasmanian authors exclusively. She runs a consultancy on the writing, editing and publishing processes called Paige Turner and has worked as Writer in Residence with younger onset dementia clients at Alzheimer’s Tasmania. She is currently working with inmates at Risdon Prison who struggle with literacy running Tales From the Slammer, poetry workshops, and will be producing a radio documentary supported the Community Broadcasting Foundation’s National Feature and Documentary Series about her prison work and the broader issue of literacy in Tasmania.
In 2018 she managed the Storytelling Tent at Nayri Niara festival and in 2018 she will return to the Huon Valley Midwinter Festival as producer and host of the Storytelling Cup.

 

Lisa Fontaine is a young short fiction writer who has previously been published in Open Pen and Indiana Voice Journal. Her story was Open Pen’s issue 12 cover piece. She currently lives in London where she is a student at the university of Greenwich. She has also founded a cult cinema website, bloodpopcorn.com.

 

Ian Green is a writer from Northern Scotland now based in Hackney. His short fiction has been extensively published, broadcast, and performed, including winning the BBC Radio 4 Opening Lines competition, and anthologies for Almond Press, OpenPen, Transportation Press, and The Pigeonhole. His work can be found at http://www.ianthegreen.com.

 

Susie Greenhill lives on the mouth of a river in Tasmania’s far south. The manuscript for her soon-to-be-finished first novel, ‘The Clinking,’ an ecological love story about grief and extinction in a warming world, won the 2016 Richell Prize. She has a PhD in creative writing and environmental literature.

Erin Hortle is a Tasmanian-based writer of fiction and essay. Her writing has been featured in a range of Tasmanian and Australian publications, including Island, The Lifted Brow, Kill Your Darlings, Overland and The Australian Humanities Review (forthcoming), and in 2017 she won the Tasmanian Young Writer’s Fellowship as a part of the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Awards. She is currently putting the finishing touches to a Creative Writing PhD, which she has undertaken at the University of Tasmania. She is an avid surfer, and loves to write about the ocean and things ocean-related, such as octopuses, pelagic sea birds, gender politics in surf culture, and ambergris (which is a sperm whale by-product and ingredient of perfume).

 

Andrew J Lambie is an eccentric London author who does most of his writing in pubs and most of his drinking in libraries. His work floats in the cracks between satire, magical realism, and the absurd. He is the author of the novel A Carnival of the Flesh.

Darren Lee lives in Galway, Ireland and has had work published in Transportation: Islands and Cities, Storgy, Londonist and in the Fugue, Lover’s Lies and Fifty Stories For Pakistan anthologies. Several of his stories have appeared in the pages of Open Pen magazine and have also been performed on stage at the Liars’ League salon. His horror novellette The Dead Pages was published by Pigeonhole Press as part of their Scaremongrel series of stories. He regularly talks books with writers and publishers as presenter of the Inside Of A Dog podcast.

 

Claire McCarthy (née Jansen) has spent the last two years living in Montreal and touring across Canada with her band Heart Beach. She has two poetry collections – Landing on Snow and Outside in the Sun published by Fire Door Press. Claire now lives between Hobart and Melbourne and is the proud owner of two chihuahuas with matching raincoats.

 

David McGrath won the Bare Fiction Prize, the Peirene Press Story Competition, the Words with Jam short story competition and was highly commended in the Manchester Fiction Prize 2013. He has won a StorySLAM at the Royal Festival Hall, performed at London LitCrawl, Wilderness Festival, Open Pen Live, Rattle Tales, Story Sessions & several Liars League events for which he won MVP in 2013. Rickshaw, his debut novel was released in May 2015.

 

Oliver Mestitz grew up in Hobart, where he he took himself seriously as a jazz drummer while teaching himself to play guitar and write songs on the side. He has published fiction, poetry and essays in publications such as Island, The Lifted Brow and Going Down Swinging. A short story appears in Transportation: Islands and Cities. He currently lives in Melbourne and makes music as The Finks.

 

Fereshteh Molavi born in Tehran, Fereshteh Molavi was raised and lived there before mooing to Toronto in 1998. While in Iran, she published works of fiction, among them The house of Cloud and Wind, and The Sun Fairy and Other Stories. She has translated many literary works and compiled a comprehensive biography of short storied in Persian. A former research librarian and the Persian bibliographer at Sterling Library, Yale University, she has published numerous stories and essays internationally. Her dialogue with Karen Connelly, Listen to the Reed, was published by Pen Canada in 2005. Her recently published books in Tehran include three novels, The Departures of Season, was admired by the Mehregan Literary Award (Tehran, 2012). Due to censorship in Iran, her latest collect of short stories, Stoning of Summer, as well her collection of essays, Those Years, These Essays, were released in Europe.

Tadhg Muller comes from Hobart, Tasmania. He has spent the last decade living in London, he currently lives in the Pays de la Loire, France. His short stories have been published in Australia, UK, USA, and India.

 

Ruairi Murphy is a librarian and writer based in Hobart. In 2017, he was shortlisted for the Tasmanian Premier’s literary prize in the category of unpublished manuscript and was a finalist in the Tasmanian writer’s prize. His fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies, most notably the 2017 anthology Seven Stories. In his writing, Ruairi likes to explore themes around identity, memory, and the boundaries between human and animal.

Shirindokht Nourmanesh is a creative writer, an artist, a literary translator, and an independent researcher with a focus on symbolism in writings of Iranian women. With two compilations of short stories in Persian, one collection of poems in English, and several fiction and non-fiction pieces, she is the Iranian editor for The Third Script: Stories from Iran, Tasmania, & the UK. Shirindokht is the founder of Vesta Arts & Lectures, co-founder of the San Jose City College Middle Eastern Heritage Month, co-founder of Red Chair Writing Workshop, and the co-founder of Gerdayesh for the academic study of Shahnameh, the Book of Kings. She was the last director of the Association of Iranian American Writers and one of the three jurists for the No to Censorship Contest by Siamak Pourzand Foundation. Shirindokht currently works on a novel, a collection of short stories, and the translations of Mowlana Rumi’s poetry from Persian. She lives in Saratoga, California.

 

Adam Ouston’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many literary magazines, anthologies and news and culture publications. He is the recipient of the 2014 Erica Bell Literary Award and a 2017 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Award. He lives in Hobart, Tasmania.

 

Zane Pinner is a writer, musician, and filmmaker from Tasmania. His work explores the mystical, and sublime, and the epic and has been published or broadcast across a wide variety of mediums. He is currently the post-production editor of a children’s television series.

East Londoner Sean Preston is the editor of short fiction platform Open Pen, considered by Francis Plug: “More like a shot of absinthe than a boring pint of lager.”

Sean is an ex-pro wrestler, full-time thing-maker at a South London record label, and short fiction writer, obviously.He tweets from @SeanPrestonLDN

Monirio Ravanipour is an internationally acclaimed writer who has published ten books in Iran, including two collections of short fiction. Her tales, described as “reminiscent in their fantastic blend of realism, myth, and superstition of writers like Rulfo, Garcia Marquez, even Tutuola”, frequently take as their setting the small, relate villages in southern Iran where she was born. Ms Ravanipour was among seventeen activists to face trial for their participation in the 2000 Berlin Conference, accused of taking part in anti-Iran propaganda. Copies of her current work were recently stripped from bookstore shelves in Iran in a countrywide police action. She is a former Brown University International Writers Project Fellow.

Shreya Sen-Handley, currently writing a libretto for the Welsh National Opera and a book of short stories for HarperCollins, former television producer and journalist Shreya Sen-Handley is also kept busy by her children, human and canine, her creative writing workshops for a range of organisations including the Universities of Nottingham and Cambridge, her regular prattle on BBC and Notts TV, her occasional forays into illustrating, her plentiful articles for the international media including the National Geographic and The Guardian, and the fallout from her recent UNESCO Cities of Literature endorsed memoir, “Memoirs of My Body”, published by HarperCollins.

Lucinda Shannon is a spoken word artist, writer and musician. She live in Launceston, the two she was born in and the town she intends to die in. She struggles with nicotine addiction and the knowledge that time is an immense wheel that turns and turns, devastating all in its wake and making it hard to pack in all that needs to be done in the average day. Lucinda’s writing have appeared in the 40 Degree South Short Story Compilation and Upswell. In 2013 she founded Slamduggery, the first month;y spoken word slam in Launceston. Now in other capable hands it continues to evolve. She performs her own spoken word in Tasmania and on the big island. Her music projects feed into her literary works.

Bert Spinks is a writer, poet, storyteller and bushwalking guide from Tasmania. His work spans a variety of genres, looking at history, geography, travel, politics, culture, beer, and Aussie Rules football.  He has been a contributor to the Crafty Pint, Open Road Review, Tasmania Forty South, Transportation Press, Vice, Crikey, the Daily Review, Places Magazineand other online and printed publications. In August 2016, his landscape-travelogue On a hasty journey across Iceland was short-listed for the Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers.  Bert has also been an invited guest to the Tamar Valley Writers Festival (2016), Tasmanian Poetry Festival (2014), the Junction Arts Festival (2016) and the Unconformity Festival (2016). He has performed storytelling and poetry at various events in Australia and around the world.  He has also created site-specific work in Santa Cruz County, California, as the first recipient of the Woods Conservation Fellowship (2014); and in Nagano, Japan, in collaboration with visual artist Masako Morita (2014).

Matt Turpin was born in Scotland and now lives in Nottingham, England. He is a former postal worker, labourer and barman amongst other stalled careers but now works as part of the team celebrating Nottingham being a UNESCO City of Literature, which is a more enjoyable role than those previous. He wastes his spare time running a hyper-local magazine, making the occasional film, journalism and anything else that grabs his interest. He is married with toddler son, two cats and three oriental fire-bellied toads.

Siamak Vossoughi was born in Tehran, grew up in Seattle, and lives in San Francisco. He has had some stories published in Glimmer Train, Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, and The Rumpus. His collection, Better Than War, received a Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 2014.

 

Ben Walter’s poetry, fiction and essays have been widely published in Australian journals, including Meanjin, Overland, Southerly and The Lifted Brow. His debut novel manuscript was the winner of the people’s choice category in the 2017 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes. His latest book is Conglomerate, published as part of the Lost Rocks series.

 

Nooshin Vahidi was born in Tehran, Iran, and moved to the United States in 2001. She writes short stories-mainly in Persian- some of which have been published in literary magazine such as Zendeh-rood (Iran, Baran (Sweden), and The Persian Book Review (USA). She also had a blog from 2003 to 2007 where she published som of her short stories. She holds a bachelor’s degree in business management, works as an aesthetician, and lives with her husband in San Diego, CA.

 

By day Amber Wilson works as a journalist covering courts and crime in Melbourne’s CBD. By night she’s a fiction writer and is currently working on a series of shorts with a focus on feminism and the femme fatale archetype. She grew up in Hobart and now calls Victoria and Tasmania her dual homes, where her spare time is spent treasure hunting for vintage finds, reading old books, dancing Latin and tapping away on a 1980s manual typewriter.

 

Emma L Waters has written for music press and her short stories have appeared in various journals and collections including Seven Stories and Transportation Press: Islands and Cities. Emma is also an award-winning songwriter, performing under the name EWAH. After half a lifetime in Melbourne, she calls Tasmania home again.

N. Quentin Woolf is a novelist and a broadcaster. Woolf’s debut novel The Death of the Poet was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2014. A passionate advocate of the benefit of peer critique, Woolf has hosted Writers’ Mutuel, a popular collaborative critique for writers for a number of years. He also runs The Writers’ Lab in East London, is a teacher of creative writing and is the founder of The Brick Lane Book Group. A former presenter of The Arts Show for radio, NQW is now anchor of Londonist Out Loud, a weekly podcast focusing on news, arts, and history in the capital of GB.

One of the leading fiction writers in India, Kulpreet Yadav retired voluntarily from the armed forces of India to pursue a career in writing in 2014. His latest novel Murder in Paharganj (Bloomsbury), was published in 2017. Kulpreet lives in Delhi, India, and is currently writing a book on true crime along with a critically acclaimed Bollywood actor, Sushant Singh.”

 

Ramin Zahed is a Los Angeles-based writer and editor. He is currently a senior editor at the Insight Editions Publishing House. Prior to Insight, he was the Editor in Chief of Animation Magazine and a senior editor at Variety and Los Angeles PBS station, KCET, His articles have also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, Wired and Hollywood Life. He has has written several books on animation, including The Art of DreamWorks, The Art of The Little Prince, The Art of Home and The Art of Rise of the Guardians.