Where are they now – George Turner Shortlist, 1998

by Anna Hepworth

Last week’s post on the winners (and shortlisters) of the George Turner Award has prompted us to wander off to find out where any (or maybe all) of them have gone on to. To start on this exciting journey, we are starting with 1998. To refresh your memories, the list of shortlisters (in alphabetical order by lastname), were Tom Dullemond, Elaine Edwards, Narelle Harris, Edwina Harvey, Luke Kendall, Kim Matheson, Leslie Jospeph Petersen, and Joel Shepherd, with the winner being Tansy Rayner Roberts.

Of these, I personally, am aware some of what four of these people have been up to in recent years – Tansy Rayner Roberts,  Narelle Harris and Joel Shepherd have published a number of books in the intervening years, with Tansy also active in reviewing activities and winning the occasional Ditmar awards, and Edwina Harvey has been reliably publishing the Australian SF Bullsheet for quite some time now as well as being involved in the Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine publishing collective. But living on the West Coast, in our parochial little fannish cocoon, I am not always aware of what is happing in the East.

And there are some interesting bits and pieces out there. For example, looking at Harris’ author site, I find a link to a review by Roberts of Harris’ new book. This appears to be Harris’ tenth book, although the counting is a little confusing, given that the two books she shortlisted for the Turner Prize have been published both separately and in an omnibus edition. Roberts herself has her eighth book coming out “soon”, according to her list of publications. Both Harris and Roberts have suffered the fate of many authors – multiple of their books are out of print. Roberts has a number of other activities of a fannish or sf professional  –  she is one third of the Hugo-nominated Galactic Suburbia podcast and has over 40 reviews on the ASiF! reviews site. Joel Shepherd has seven books published with the most recent in 2010, but as the ‘bio’ section of his author’s page is not working (right now), it is difficult to see what else he may have been up to.

Of the others, Harvey has published one novel, and her personal site focuses more on non-writing creative endeavours; Dullemond appears to have published 2 books (although that information is from Goodreads) and to have focused his creative endeavours on writing management software; searching for Kendall finds a professional basketball player who would have been too young to be eligible for the prize (given that he was born in 1981); searching for Edwards and Matheson bring up very little, but that may be due to the relative commonness of the names (facebook finds 5 Elaine Edwards and 3 Kim Mathesons who list Australia as their places of residence); and nothing is found for Petersen (although there are many Leslie Petersen’s, none appear to be in Australia).

Further information will be gratefully received – please tell us what you know!

17 comments

  1. An article from Edwina Harvey with Ian Nichols in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine 56 confirms that Les Petersen from Canberra was shortlisted for the inaugural George Turner Prize.

  2. Hi, I’m Luke Kendall (but not the American basketballer).

    I just stumbled over your page when doing a search to refresh my memory on when the inaugural George Turner contest was, as part of submitting my work (very heavily rewritten) in the current Harper Voyager call for unagented unpublished SF/F novels. I was pleased to see my suspicion that the Perth author who couldn’t make it to the finalists’ dinner way back then was Joel Shepherd – I’ve read all his books with great pleasure.

    For myself, I’ve always felt very strongly that my novel, and the main character especially, must one day see the light of day. Though I also realised that learning your writing craft by writing and then rewriting a full length novel (each time I discovered a major writing weakness), is not the most efficient way to do it! I finished the last rewrite in Feb this year, for the 2012 ABNA contest, but they didn’t like my synopsis: it didn’t get past that initial hurdle. 🙁

    I’ve been working at Canon’s R&D company since 1991 (I’m in IT), and that has taken up most of my energy. Frankly, if this current Harper-Voyager chance doesn’t pan out, I’m planning to just self-publish it via smashwords or similar, and pull my finger out finish off the follow-on novels.

    Yes, Les Petersen from Canberra and Edwina Harvey were also finalists way back then: they’re nice people.

  3. Well, it never made it past the checking-the-blurb stage of the ABNA, but I’m now trying it with Amazon’s new e-publishing site. The campaign for my novel “Wild Thing” will launch on January 23, 2015 12:00 AM EST and end on February 22, 2015 12:00 AM EST. (I think that’s 2pm AEST.)

    Here’s the linkwhich should be activated at 2pm Sat 23rd Jan (Sydney time):
    https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/3FT35CWR0JXFO

    Basically, authors submit their completed work, and for 30 days, Amazon makes a small site that includes the cover, tagline, blurb, and an excerpt (the first 5,000 words), and a button to nominate the book. That little site then stays available for 30 days.

    Readers can browse through the Kindle Scout site (https://kindlescout.amazon.com/), and nominate up to three books. Amazon then use the number of nominations to help decide which ones to look at further, and consider electronically publishing. If it’s popular enough, they may also do a print edition.

    So, if you want to see the first parts of what I’ve produced after so many years of effort, have a look! And if you like it… 🙂

    Regards,

    luke

    1. Hi Luke

      Thanks for checking back in. Apologies with respect to how long it took for your comments to get out of moderation – they got caught in the spam queue, possibly because of the embedded links.

      regards,
      Anna

  4. Well, it just went live! Here’s the more complicated URL Amazon sent me: https://www.amazon.com/gp/r.html?C=3KRKL8BRA5K9I&K=A1HQMVPWBY4935&R=2GU0I7C4V1HKE&T=C&U=https%3A%2F%2Fkindlescout.amazon.com%2Fp%2F3FT35CWR0JXFO%3Fref_%3Dpe_886810_126055510&A=G8IUE2XIQUMBPILTGOAJT31BRWIA&H=SO2JXKQSOJ02JJAAOJSK4J2JQBSA
    Though the short one appears to work, too.

    Now for 30 days of biting my nails to see if the public (and then Amazon) are suficiently intrigued.

    Cheers,

    luke

  5. I didn’t realise that to have a chance, I needed to have a large social media following.
    If anyone’s interested, I’m determined to hit my self-imposed deadline for self-publishing it at the end of June (2015). The book is called Wild Thing. And here’s the blurb:

    Leeth wants to belong. But abandoned by her parents due to
    a prophecy, raised as an experimental test subject at the
    Institute for Paranormal Dysfunction, then taken by a
    covert agency to become their assassin, she’ll do well just
    to survive. Now, unknowingly stalked by a magical construct
    seeking the special victim it needs to ‘correct’ human
    nature itself: will Leeth’s future be experimental subject,
    government assassin, or humanity’s doom?

    Or can a young girl prove strong enough to forge her own Path,
    instead?

    You can also see what I’m learning about self-publishing by checking in on my blog: A Toe in the Ocean of Books.

  6. Apologies for this belated update – I’ve been writing hard. I self-published the first two books in the series, and will publish the 3rd (Shadow Hunt) in early 2017 (it is with my editor now). The first two have been in the top 2000 in all their categories on Amazon for some months now, without advertising, although both books have been very divisive due to the subject matter: they’re definitely not to everyone’s taste.
    Both Wild Thing (vol1) and Harsh Lessons (vol 2) are available in print or via Kindle/App at Amazon.
    I also have a blog that focuses on the series in particular and on writing in general (“All About Leeth”), but I won’t provide any links to avoid the fate of my first contact.
    It might also be of marginal interest to know that that first MS has been and will be used for about half of each of the first four novels. I’ve been devoting my full time to my writing since March 2015, and very happy with the editor I found (Dave Taylor, in the UK), whose critiques and suggestions have been hugely helpful.

  7. Hi, I left a comment on the other George Turner Prize article on this site, then found this one, which seems more appropriate!
    My name is Kim Chesson, but in 1998 I was Kim Matheson from the short-list. I was flattered to read that you had tried to find me 🙂
    Like Luke Kendall, I stumbled across this article while doing research. Back then, I had no luck getting Betrayer published. Louise Thurtell told me I had been runner up (though maybe they told all of us that!) and that she would be in touch about publication, but then I was told it was too long (and it was) but every shortened version I sent was rejected.
    Eventually I gave up, got married, became a mum, lived my life. But (again like Luke) I still wanted to put my book out there where it could be read, if anyone wanted to. When I realised how easy self-publishing had become, I scrambled around, managed to retrieve the files from 3.5″ floppy disks (!) and voila! Betrayer is now live on Amazon under my married name. So far, I am the only one who’s bought it, but my baby is out in the world, and that’s the important thing
    So, Anna, thanks for not forgetting about us!

  8. Hi.

    In case there’s any doubt, yes, I am Les Petersen, the illustrator/author. Like Kim above, I got distracted by life (my illustration business really took off after the George Turner), but now that all the illustration work is slowing down, I’m back to writing. I’m also publishing Supplejack on Amazon (right now, actually), and have just uploaded the ebook for anyone interested. I’ll eventually get the other novels sorted out as well.

    Les

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