Margo Lanagan
We are delighted to welcome to Christchurch the award-winning Australian author Margo Lanagan, best known for her provocative, disturbing short fiction for young adults.She is also in great demand as a public speaker, and we have no doubt that her keynote address will get the conference off to a thought-provoking start.
Margo Lanagan was born in 1960 and spent her childhood in the Hunter Valley (NSW), her teens in Melbourne, her twenties travelling, and then settled in Sydney. She has a history degree from the universities of Perth and Sydney. Once she'd tried kitchen, sales and office work, she decided there had to be more to life, and she has been working towards full-time writing, (and sometimes succeeding!), for 15 years or so now. When the money runs low she does contract technical writing.
Margo says: ‘I write because it's my way of making sense of the world. I've always loved reading, both to escape from real life and to make life more real, and I like doing both in my writing, too, writing straight realistic and fantasy stories.’
Margo has written many books; the latest is Red Spikes, a collection of short stories with fantastical/science fiction/horror aspects to them. It won Book of the Year, Older Readers, in the 2007 Children's Book Council of Australia's book awards. This collection follows White Time and Black Juice, the latter a World Fantasy Award winner in 2005.
Margo has recently finished a fantasy novelcalled Tender Morsels, which will be published later this year.