Jo Anderton's Blog

Joanne Anderton is an Australian author of speculative fiction, creative non-fiction, and children’s books.

Her speculative fiction includes the novels in the Veiled Worlds series – Debris, Suited and Guardian – and the short story collections The Art of Broken Things, Inanimates: Tales of Everyday Fear, and The Bone Chime Song and Other Stories.

Her most recent work is Pixerina, a haunted house novella set in the Australian suburbs, about what society demands of women and how much we’re willing to sacrifice to escape those expectations. It’s a story of grief, of wrenching back control when your life has been derailed, and the obsessive need to create art. Coming in 2026 from Bad Hand Books, and available to preorder here!

She has won multiple awards for her speculative fiction, including the Australian Shadows Award, Ditmar and Aurealis Awards. Her short fiction has been reprinted in several Year’s Best anthologies, and she’s received international review coverage in The New York Journal of Books, The Guardian, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly.

Her children’s picture book The Flying Optometrist, was published by the National Library of Australia and was a CBCA notable book. Her non-fiction has been published in Speculative Insight, Island Magazine, Meanjin and The Japan News.

Joanne has a Masters of Arts in Creative Writing, worked for many years in book publishing, marketing and distribution, and until recently was teaching English in rural Japan. She has just completed a PhD in Creative Writing at The University of Queensland, writing speculative fiction memoir about her time living and working in Japan.

She can be contacted by email: anderton.joanne(at)gmail.com

Instagram: @joanneanderton

Facebook: @https://www.facebook.com/joanne.anderton.16

Or Bluesky: @joanneanderton

My short story ‘Street Blessings’ is live here at White Enso, a journal of literary, contextual and visual art inspired by Japan (oh and it won their fiction award for this issue so there’s that…). ‘Street Blessings’ is speculative fiction memoir, it’s super personal and was kinda terrifying to write…but weirdly I’m excited to get it out there, share it, and talk more about that time in my life.

When the wonderful Tehani of FableCroft Publishing asked me to write a story for her first anthology in, like, forever, of course I was going to say yes. I love FableCroft and everything she’s done — including publishing my first short story collection Bone Chime Song and Other Stories. Tehani is a great editor and all-round amazing human!

The Art of Being Human was born out 2020 and all the shit that brought with it, but is a celebration of art and hope. My contribution, ‘Birdsong’, is a story about the lasting power of imaginary worlds, and was inspired by Ellis Rowan. Ellis lived from 1848 to 1922 and was an incredible artist and woman who defied expectations and social pressures in the pursuit of her craft — including travelling to New Guinea in 1916 at the age of almost 70 (!) to paint birds of paradise. This is the story I have reimagined in ‘Birdsong’. You can learn a bit more about her here.

The Art of Being Human Kickstarter is up and going great guns. I’m so thrilled to be a part of something dedicated to bringing light to dark times.

It’s so exciting to see The Art of Broken Things out in the big wide world.

Thank you to Elizabeth from ‘Nerds of a Feather’ for this lovely, thoughtful review

‘A new collection of short stories from one of Australia’s hidden treasures will break your heart and mend it back together with gold‘

In particular, this quote:

“One of the delightful things about collections is that they make the preoccupations of the author wonderfully clear. This is most certainly true of The Art of Broken Things. Many of the characters in these stories are outsiders, some literally living on the outskirts of town, others simply strangers in a foreign culture. They are people facing grief or toxic relationships, people who are desperate and despairing.”

Sometimes, as a writer, you don’t realise you’re doing this very thing – exploring stuff that’s going down in your real life through fiction. This might be doubly true when you’re a speculative fiction writer like me. Sometimes a story about a spacewalk is a story about a spacewalk. Sometimes, it’s me, dealing with the way my marriage and very long term relationship ended. A lot of the time we do this subconsciously, and it’s only when putting a collection together – even seeing a review of said collection – that we realise.

“Few things are more enjoyable or disturbing than a Joanne Anderton story. They feel like reality with the gravity turned off and, freed from those surly bonds, you float. But beware: broken things lurk in the darkness of space, earth, sea – and they’re hungry.” — Angela Slatter, award-winning author of All the Murmuring Bones

A marriage dissolves in the middle of a spacewalk…

A lonely robot searches for the remains of a long-lost child…

An empty nester is haunted by victims of the bushfires that surround her home…

These are tales of breaking and rebuilding, falling apart and being put back together.

The stories in The Art of Broken Things blur the line between genres to explore some of our deepest, most fundamentally human concerns: what does it mean to build a family? And what are we willing to sacrifice, to keep that family together?

From multiple award-winning author Joanne Anderton comes a new collection of dark science fiction, horror and weird.

Available now from Trepidatio Publishing!

“Joanne Anderton is a master of the uncanny. Each of her stories is like a torch shone into the dark crevices of the imagination, and you may not always like what they reveal: terror, wonder, and a strange, dark beauty. Highly recommended.” — Helen Marshall, author of The Migration

“Joanne Anderton’s stories are deeply atmospheric and powerfully engage the heart and the mind. She imagines futures both dark and entirely too possible, with characters you will come to know intimately. One of this generation’s most talented writers, this collection showcases an author firing on all cylinders.” — Alan Baxter, author of The Gulp and Devouring Dark

New Book!

Just in time for Halloween comes ‘Inanimates: Tales of Everyday Fear’

Inanimates finds the terrifying in the everyday, bringing together seven stories where ordinary objects become the source of nightmares and extraordinary threat. 

In “Thread Embrace,” a well-dressed killer finds himself at the mercy of an unexpectedly sartorial threat. “Simulation Theory” sees a wounded soldier bonds with the bomb disposal robot he worked with in the field. In the heartbreaking last story, “High Density”, the comfortable suburban ideal of a retired couple becomes a war against a dark and dangerous form of urban renewal.

In turns wicked, delightful, horrifying, and fantastic, Inanimates: Tales of Everyday Fear showcases a hidden gem of the Australian genre scene, and highlights Anderton’s ability to see the dark, supernatural threats inherent in ordinary things.

Available HERE from Brain Jar Press!

2020 has been a strange and difficult year, we all know that. But as we step into 2021 it’s important to remember that good things can happen in dark times, and one of those good things are stories! So here are a couple of short stories of mine that just snuck into 2020, being published right at the end of the year.

Hideous Armature came out at the end of November in Midnight Echo 15, published by the AHWA.

A story about body image and taxidermy, it’s dark and weird and very personal.

Read more about it in an interview I did with the editor, the amazing Lee Murray.

Midnight Echo 15 has an amazing TOC and can be found here.

And just making it into 2020, is the beautiful Unnatural Order published by the CSFG. Check it out here.

Edited by Alis Franklin and Lyss Wickramasinghe, Unnatural Order shines a light on the monstrous beings of myth and legend; framing the beast as the protagonist and seeking their humanity.

My contribution, New Things, is a story of robots and dragons, of purpose and identity.

And, I hope, it ends the year on a high note. Here’s to 2021.

My story ‘Human Error’ is out now in Issue 21 of Dimension6. It’s a great Aussie publication that has published some amazing stories over the years, and I’m super excited to be there. Sadly, Issue 21 will be the final issue. So I encourage you to check it out, and all the previous issues too. Also… it’s free!

Human Error
‘Used up and worn out. Machines and people. We’re all the same in the end.’

In very exciting news, ‘Wreck Diving‘ has won the 2019 Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Short Story! This is so cool, not only because it’s lovely to see a story get some love (particularly a story as close to my heart as this one) but also because look at that trophy!

The Awards were hosted over Zoom this year thanks to the ongoing pandemic, and while I missed the socialising and the seeing everyone in person, it was still so heartening to watch the Australian science fiction come together and support each other this way.

Congratulations to the organisers for doing an amazing job under such circumstances, and to all the winning and shortlisted authors!

You can read ‘Wreck Diving’ in Aurealis issue #123.

In very exciting news, ‘Wreck Diving‘ has won the 2019 Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Short Story! This is so cool, not only because it’s lovely to see a story get some love (particularly a story as close to my heart as this one) but also because look at that trophy!

The Awards were hosted over Zoom this year thanks to the ongoing pandemic, and while I missed the socialising and the seeing everyone in person, it was still so heartening to watch the Australian science fiction come together and support each other this way.

Congratulations to the organisers for doing an amazing job under such circumstances, and to all the winning and shortlisted authors!

You can read ‘Wreck Diving’ in Aurealis issue #123.