The AHWA Subscriberthon is on!
If you join or renew your AHWA membership before midnight (AEDT) Sunday 16 February 2025 you’ll be in the draw for some amazing prizes including books, artworks, story critiques and more!
Annual membership is an absolute bargain at only $40.
Details of the amazing prize packs and competition terms and conditions are below.
Don’t delay – join or renew today!
New members: email AustralasianHorror@gmail.com and let us know you’d like to join.
Current members: you will have been sent a renewal email. If you haven’t got one yet (or have lost it) email ahwamembers@gmail.com
The AHWA provides a community and unified voice for Australasian writers of dark fiction, fostering the evolution of the genre within Australia. Read more about all the benefits of joining this supportive group.
Prize packs
Main prize pack 1: value $500
• A Greg Chapman original A4 artwork – gouache on paper
• Kaaron Warren 2,000-word short story critique
• Love, Death and Robots V1 and V2/3 signed by Tim Miller and others
• SNAFU – AI Insurrection, signed by Geoff Brown
• Nosferatu Unbound eds. Steven Paulsen and Christopher Sequeira
• Spawn 2: More Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies ed. Deborah Sheldon
• Black Days and Bloody Nights by Greg Chapman
• Cretaceous Canyon by Deborah Sheldon, ebook
• The Grief Hole by Kaaron Warren, hardcover, signed
• A pair of zombie earrings by LZS Creations
Main prize pack 2: value $500
• Lynette Watters A3 artwork
• Aaron Dries 2,000-word short story critique
• Damnation Games ed. Alan Baxter, hardcover
• This Fresh Hell eds. Katya de Becerra and Narrelle M Harris
• Nosferatu Unbound eds. Steven Paulsen and Christopher Sequeira
• Spawn 2: More Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies ed. Deborah Sheldon
Remains to be Told: Dark Tales of Aotearoa ed. Lee Murray
• Black Days and Bloody Nights by Greg Chapman
• Bodily Harm by Deborah Sheldon, ebook
• Scavengers by Robert Hood
• A pair of zombie earrings by LZS Creations
Runner up prize pack 1: value $200
• Geneve Flynn 2,000-word short story critique
• Metamorphosis by Claire Fitzpatrick
• The Crying Forest by Venero Armanno
• Peripheral Visions Vol 1 by Robert Hood
• Cretaceous Canyon by Deborah Sheldon, ebook
• Spider and skull bookmarks by LZS Creations
Runner up prize pack 2: value $200
• JS Breukelaar 2,000-word short story critique
• A Vindication of Monsters ed. Claire Fitzpatrick
• Shadows on the Wall by Steven Paulsen
• Metamorphosis by Claire Fitzpatrick
• Cretaceous Canyon by Deborah Sheldon, ebook
• Spider and skull bookmarks by LZS Creations
Runner up prize pack 3: value $200
• Joseph Ashley-Smith 2,000-word short story critique
• Peripheral Visions Vol 1 by Robert Hood
• Metamorphosis by Claire Fitzpatrick
• Contrition by Deborah Sheldon
• Bodily Harm by Deborah Sheldon, ebook
• Spider and skull bookmarks by LZS Creations
Subscriberthon terms and conditions
• The subscribe-a-thon runs until midnight (AEDT) Sunday 16 February 2025.
• It is open to all Australasian members who renew their membership or join for the 2025 calendar year. Membership is open to Australasian writers over 18 years of age who reside in (or are originally from) Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, or the Pacific Islands.
• Prizes will be drawn using a random prize generator once all entries have been collected and entered into the member records.
• The short story critique is for one short story up to 2,000 words. If the story length is less than this, the prize winner is not able to send in a second story. Once feedback has been sent to the prize winner, the prize also includes one set of questions to the author regarding the feedback. Once contact has been made with the prize winner the critiquing authors details will be forwarded.
• All prizes will be mailed to prize winners on confirmation of their address (excluding story critiques as per above) by an AHWA representative at the AHWA’s cost within two weeks of the announcement of Subscribe-a-thon winners.
• AHWA committee members and subscribe-a-thon sponsors are not eligible to enter the prize draw.
• Prizes are not transferrable or refundable.
• Prize winners will be contacted by email and announced on the AHWA Facebook page on Sunday 23 February 2025.
Prize pack contributors
Thank you to all our wonderful prize-pack contributors. Read more about each of them and their work below.
Clan Destine Press
Lindy Cameron is a founding member and current Vice President of Sisters in Crime Australia and publisher of the independent Australian publishing house Clan Destine Press. CDP specialises in genre fiction, and their list the includes crime and mystery, speculative fiction and sci-fi, horror and historical fiction of more than 30 authors.
Clan Destine champions the idea of anthologies, and delights in gathering authors from Australia, New Zealand and further abroad, into themed crime and horror anthologies. This includes Who Sleuthed It? of which Lindy is the contributing editor.
Find out more at Clan Destine Press
Greg Chapman
Greg Chapman is a horror author and artist based in Queensland. He is the author of novels including Hollow House, The Noctuary: Pandemonium and Netherkind and the collections, Vaudeville and Other Nightmares, This Sublime Darkness and Other Dark Stories and Black Days and Bloody Nights. He’s created book covers and artworks for publishers in Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, including for IFWG Publishing.
Find out more about his fiction at www.darkscrybe.com and his art at www.dark-designs.com
Lynette Watters
Lynette Watters is a Western Sydney-based artist with a lifelong passion for the eerie and otherworldly. Her vibrant digital artworks draw inspiration from mythology, folklore, and the Australian natural world, often exploring themes of mystery, transformation, and the uncanny and her illustrations regularly appear in Aurealis Magazine. When not creating, she cares for her birds, cats, and green tree frogs, finding inspiration in the shadowy edges of everyday life.
Find out more about her work at https://lynette-watters.square.site/ or follow her on Instagram
IFWG Publishing International Ⓡ and sister company IPI Comics Ⓡ
IFWG Publishing International is an Australian-based international publishing house, distributed through IPG Distribution, based in Chicago. It started very small and grew to its current size and market penetration over a 15-year period, many of its titles winning national and international awards. IFWG publishes speculative fiction from middle grade up, but specialises in horror and dark fantasy. Recently IFWG’s mother company, SQ Mag Pty Ltd, created the IPI Comics business that distributes through Diamond and Lunar distributors, and specialist crowd funding campaigns.
Find out more at https://ifwgpublishing.com/
Cohesion Press
Geoff Brown is an award-winning Australian author and editor who writes across various genres, with a full-length memoir, numerous short stories, and articles published in regional and metropolitan newspapers.
Geoff is the owner of Cohesion Press, an acclaimed publishing house specialising in military horror. He also works alongside Deadpool director Tim Miller as a senior story consultant. Additionally, Geoff owns Asylum Ghost Tours, offering unique paranormal experiences.
Find out more at https://www.cohesionpress.com/ and https://www.explorebeechworth.com.au/listing/asylum-ghost-tours-beechworth/
Deborah Sheldon
Deborah Sheldon writes poems, short stories, novellas and novels across the darker spectrum of horror, crime and noir as well as feature articles for magazines, non-fiction books, TV scripts, stage plays and medical writing. Her titles include the novels Cretaceous Canyon, Body Farm Z, Contrition, and Devil Dragon; the novella Thylacines; and collections Perfect Little Stitches and Other Stories, Figments and Fragments: Dark Stories, and Liminal Spaces: Horror Stories. Her latest titles are the crime-horror novel Bodily Harm and the anthology Spawn 2: More Weird Horror Tales About Pregnancy, Birth and Babies. Visit Deb at http://deborahsheldon.wordpress.com
J S Breukelaar
J S Breukelaar is the author of the novels American Monster, Aletheia and The Bridge and the short story collection Collision: Stories. Her most recent book, the novella Remedy, was published in 2024.
Breukelaar has published short fiction, essays and poetry in The Dark Magazine, Black Static, Juked, Unnerving, Lightspeed, Gamut, The Nervous Breakdown, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, LitReactor, and in anthologies like Tiny Nightmares, Welcome to Dystopia, and Women Writing the Weird. She also teaches literature and writing at Sydney University and Western Sydney University.
Find out more at https://www.jsbreukelaar.com/
Kaaron Warren
Kaaron Warren published her first short story in 1993 and has had fiction in print every year since.
She’s published six novels: Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, The Grief Hole, Tide of Stone and The Underhistory and seven short story collections, including IFWG’s The Gate Theory. Her most recent short story collection is Calvaria Fell, with Cat Sparks, from Meerkat Press. Her stories have appeared in Ellen Datlow’s and Paula Guran’s Year’s Best anthologies.
Her writing podcast Let the Cat In showcases ideas, objects, and inspirations.
Find out more at https://kaaronwarren.wordpress.com/
J Ashley-Smith
J. Ashley Smith is a Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of dark fiction and co-host of the award-winning podcast Let The Cat In. He has published the novellas The Attic Tragedy, Ariadne I Love You and a short story collection The Measure of Sorrow. He has also published numerous short stories, which are available on podcasts and in anthologies and magazines including Aurealis Magazine, SQ Mag, Midnight Echo, Sunshine Bright and Darkness Deep and Tales to Terrify and many more.
Find out more at https://www.spooktapes.net/
Geneve Flynn
Geneve Flynn is a speculative fiction editor, author, and poet. She is the co-editor (with Lee Murray) of Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women, the dark fiction anthology which launched the grassroots movement in Asian women’s horror writing in 2020. She also collaborated with Lee Murray, Christina Sng, and Angela Yuriko Smith on the internationally acclaimed dark poetry collection, Tortured Willows: Bent, Bowed, Unbroken.
Her work has been published by Crystal Lake Publishing, PS Publishing, Flame Tree Publishing, PseudoPod, and Written Backwards. Read more at https://www.geneveflynn.com.au and Facebook, Instagram and BlueSky
Aaron Dries
Aaron Dries is a Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Award nominated, and Ditmar, Australian Shadows and Aurealis Award-winning author based in Canberra, Australia. His titles include the House of Sighs, Where the Dead Go to Die (with Mark Allan Gunnells), A Place for Sinners, The Fallen Boys, and Dirty Heads, The Sound of His Bones Breaking, plus Vandal: Stories of Damage with Kaaron Warren and J.S. Breukelaar and Cut to care: A Collection of Little Hurts. Dries is one host of the podcast, Let the Cat In, and co-founded Elsewhere Here Productions, and is represented by the Annie Bomke Literary Agency
Contact via TikTok, Bluesky, Instagram, Threads and X
