Our second collection of short stories is The Third Script, stories from Iran, Tasmania & the UK. This publication places invited and open submission writers, from emerging to internationally acclaimed, alongside one another.
Robbie Arnott works as a copywriter for a Tasmanian advertising agency. His work has also been published Island, Kill Your Darlings, The Review of Australian Fiction and Visible Ink. In 2014 he won the Scribe Non Fiction prize and in 2015 he was awarded the Tasmanian Young Writer’s Fellowship.
Nazli 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 magazines in the United States. She is currently working on her first novel.
Farhad Babaei 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 were denied publication in Iran due to heavy censorship. They were eventually published in the UK by H&S Media. His last novel Mr. Shahpour Gerauoli with Family was published last year in Iran. He currently lives in Tehran.
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 Staves collection, and by Open Pen. He has written about books and music for theguardian.com.
Lisa Fontaine is a young short fiction writer who has previously been published in Open Pen Magazine 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. This New Year she also founded cult cinema website, bloodpopcorn.com.
Calcutta-born, Nottingham-based mother of two, Shreya Sen Handley is a former television journalist and producer for channels such as CNBC and MTV, who now writes and illustrates for the British and Indian media. A columnist for the National Geographic, Times of India and Nottingham Post, she has also written for The Guardian, CNN, the Daily Mail and The Hindu, amongst other sites and publications. A children’s book she illustrated for Hatchette was published in 2014 and her memoir, for Harper Collins, on which she is currently working, is slated for the summer of 2016. She is one of a select seven writers featured in an anthology of short stories showcasing Nottingham writing, These Seven, published by Five Leaves in 2015, as part of Nottingham’s bid for the UNESCO City of Literature status. Her short fiction has also been published in Australia and India. Besides which, Shreya teaches creative writing and serves on the board of Nottingham’s main literary festival, the Festival of Words.
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.
Born and raised in Houston, Texas, David McGrath performed in various singing and dancing competitions as a child, and rose to fame in the late 1990s as lead singer of R&B girl-group Destiny’s Child. A self-described “modern-day feminist”, David creates work often characterised by themes of love, relationships as well as female sexuality and empowerment.
Born in Tehran, Fereshteh Molavi was raised and lived there before moving 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 also translated many literary works and compiled a comprehensive bibliography of short stories 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, two collections of short stories, and one collection of essays. One of the novels, The Departures of Seasons, was admired by the Mehregan Literary Award (Tehran, 2012). Due to censorship in Iran, her latest collection of short stories, Stoning of Summer, as well as her collection of essays, Those Years, These Essays, were released in Europe.
Ruairi Murphy is a librarian at the University of Tasmania. He has published stories in anthologies and journals. The swim back is part of his most recent project, Two sets of books, a collection of short fiction about the clandestine lives of librarians.
Shirindokht Nourmanesh is our Iranian editor. She is a scholar of poetry and prose, proficient in both Persian and English languages. She is a creative writer, an artist, a translator and an independent researcher. Her research usually focuses on female writers and poets and on symbolism in the writings of Iranian women. She has two collections of short stories in Persian and is currently at work on a novel and a collection of poems in Persian. She lectures at San Jose State University in the United States. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Transpersonal Psychology. www.shirindokht.com
Zane Pinner is a writer, musician, and filmmaker from Tasmania. His work explores the mystical, the 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.
Moniro 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, remote village in southern Iran where she was born. Ms Ravanipour was among seventeen activists to face trial in Iran 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.
Lucinda Shannon is a spoken word artist, writer and musician. She lives in Launceston, the town 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 writings have appeared in the 40 Degrees South short story compilation and Upswell Magazine. In 2013 she founded Slamduggery, the first monthly 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 work. Lucinda understands them as sustaining each other and offering further avenues for creative expression. It’s also damn good fun.
Bert Spinks is a writer, storyteller and bushwalking guide from Tasmania. His current project Field Guide to Falling in Love in Tasmania focuses on the relationship between place and memory. He has also embarked on a multi-faceted research project about the Danish adventurer Jørgen Jørgensen, based in Iceland and Tasmania.
Matt Turpin was born on a nuclear submarine base in Scotland, before being moved down to Nottinghamshire, where he was raised in a tiny house with too many siblings. After much moving around Europe, he eventually settled in Beeston, a Nottingham suburb, where he co-founded The Beestonian magazine: a monthly community journal promoting the weirdness of the town. He runs communications for Nottingham’s bid to become a UNESCO City of Literature.
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 magazines 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 some of her short stories. She holds a bachelor’s degree in business management, works as an esthetician, and lives with her husband in San Diego, CA.
Siamak Vossoughi was born in Tehran and grew up in Seattle. He lives and writes in San Francisco. He has had short stories published in various journals, including Kenyon Review Online, Missouri Review, and Glimmer Train. His short story collection, Better Than War, came out in September, and it received a 2014 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.
Amber Wilson is a Tasmanian writer who recently made the profound transition from wine to whisky, which in itself says a lot. She has been working in journalism and communications for the past decade, having worked as a staff journalist at newspapers including The Advocate, The Mercury, The Melbourne Weekly, The Age and the Scotland Herald. She has also worked as a media advisor and communications officer at a range of government, legal, university and arts bodies, including the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre. Her great passions are documentary filmmaking, slam poetry and writing fiction – preferably absurd, blackly humorous and with plenty of magic realism elements. Amber is also the proud mother of a gorgeous, deeply loving and somewhat aggressive ginger cat called Dave.
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 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.
For our first publication, Islands & Cities: A collection of short stories from Tasmania & London, the editors of Transportation invited authors to appear alongside our open submission writers.
Ben Walter is a Tasmanian writer whose stories have appeared in Overland, Island, Griffith Review and The Lifted Brow. His debut poetry manuscript, Lurching, was shortlisted in the 2013 Tasmanian Literary Prizes.
Adam Ouston has recently completed a PHD on the themes of death and identity in the travel writings of Robert Dessaix. His stories have appeared in Island, Overland, Review of Australian Fiction, Islet and Voiceworks. Ouston is also the front man of Tasmanian band All Fires.
Susie Greenhill is an exciting Tasmanian writer currently working on a collection of short fiction as part of a PhD through Edith Cowan University. Her stories have been published by Island, Etchings, Review of Australian Fiction, the Overland ebook ‘Women’s Work,’ and in anthologies by 40 South.
Tadhg Muller is a London based expat Tasmanian. Hailing from somewhere in the ether between the two locations, Muller’s fiction has been published in Skive Australia, Open Pen UK, Griffith Review Australia, Island, Stoneslide Corrective USA, Crack The Spine USA, while his poetry has been published in The Cannons Mouth UK, Skive Australia. Muller has featured as a guest poet for the London Based Homeless Literary Magazine Rough Diamonds.
Will Ashon is an English novelist, former music journalist and founder of the Big Dada imprint of Ninja Tune Records. His published novels are Clear Water (2006) and The Heritage (2008), both with Faber & Faber. On July 16, 2010, Ashon released the book 3:AM plus two others in a zip file, containing each book in an epub and pdf format, citing the influence (perhaps slightly facetiously) of grime musician Wiley, who had recently given away all the music on his hard drive in a series of zip files. [5] The Zip Trilogy, as Ashon called it, consists of three books: Monsterboy, work and After The Non-Event.
N. Quentin Woolf is a novelist and broadcaster. He read English Literature, specialising in Creative Writing, at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and journalism at the Morris College of Journalism. His short stories have appeared in international publications and online, in exhibitions and as part of stage performances. A passionate advocate of the benefits of peer critique, Woolf has hosted Writers’ Mutual, a popular collaborative critique group 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, recently rated by TimeOut one of London’s best reading groups. A former presenter of The Arts Show for radio, NQW is now the anchor of Londonist Out Loud, a weekly podcast focusing on news, arts and history in the capital. He has also appeared on BBC Radio 4.
Other writers selected for Islands & Cities are:
Tasmanian writers – Erin Hortle, Michael Blake, Emma L Waters, Oliver Mestitz, Claire Jansen
London writers – Darren Lee, Kate Ellis, Ian Green, Martin Cornwall
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