AUSTRAL 2025

"A rollicking collection--inventive, thrilling, funny and wickedly clever. The future of fiction is in safe hands." - Chris Flynn, author of Orpheus Nine

A woman finds her way out in the bottom of a crab bucket...
A ritual blade upon an obsidian altar...
An accounting of violence and an awakening to its cost…

AUSTRAL 2025 features bold new voices and award-winning authors from across the continent, interrogating the politics of identity, belief, and survival with startling originality. Here, grief walks in synthetic skin, memory haunts war-torn temples, and the cost of love is counted in claw and coin. Whether speculative, surreal, or sharply satirical, these stories crackle with electric prose and unflinching imagination.

From forlorn war stories to psychedelic techno-nightmares, this collection dives into the strange, the uncanny, and the deeply human.

"This is a darkly winter read, sombre but imbued with glimmers of hopefulness in the guts of bleakness." - Eugen Bacon, author of Danged Black Things

With writing from: Luke Weavell, Sage Hunter, William Rotor, Michaela Teschendorff Harden, Jason Schembri, M. McLellan, Caleb E. Whittaker, Arden Baker, T. R. Napper.

And illustrations from: Tracey Chen.