Contribution To Australian Speculative Fiction Culture
Since his move to Australia, he has become a major influence and much respected figure in the speculative fiction field in Australia. He has frequently attended conventions, as guest of honour, speaker and panelist, and has played an active role in encouraging the development of the field, including running and contributing to seminars and workshops on writing, such as Clarion South.
He has also raised the profile of Australian writers by publishing anthologies of their work. He co-editor (with Janeen Webb) of World Fantasy Award winning Australian anthology Dreaming Down-Under, which Peter Goldsworthy called "the biggest, boldest, most controversial collection of original fiction ever published in Australia." More recently, Dann edited Dreaming Again, a second anthology of Australian fantasy and speculative fiction, which was released in Australia in July 2008. The collection includes a number of stories produced by graduates of the Clarion South workshops and a mix of new and well known Australian writers.
A third volume, produced in editorial partnership with Jonathan Strahan, entitled Legends of Australian Fantasy was published in June 2010.
Read more about this topic: Jack Dann
Famous quotes containing the words contribution to, contribution, australian, fiction and/or culture:
“He left behind, as his essential contribution to literature, a large repertoire of jokes which survive because of their sheer neatness, and because of a certain intriguing uncertainty—which extends to Wilde himself—as to whether they really mean anything.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the world is provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer’s contribution seems not only absorbed but translated.... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce.”
—Eric Bentley (b. 1916)
“Beyond the horizon, or even the knowledge, of the cities along the coast, a great, creative impulse is at work—the only thing, after all, that gives this continent meaning and a guarantee of the future. Every Australian ought to climb up here, once in a way, and glimpse the various, manifold life of which he is a part.”
—Vance Palmer (1885–1959)
“... fiction never exceeds the reach of the writer’s courage.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)
“To assault the total culture totally is to be free to use all the fruits of mankind’s wisdom and experience without the rotten structure in which these glories are encased and encrusted.”
—Judith Malina (b. 1926)