Cat Sparks was fiction editor of Cosmos Magazine from 2010-2016. She managed Agog! Press, an Australian independent press that produced ten anthologies of new speculative fiction from 2002-2008. She’s known for her award-winning editing, writing, graphic design and photography.
Cat was born in Sydney and has traveled through Europe, the Middle East, Indonesia, the South Pacific, Mexico, North America and China. Her adventures so far have included winning a trip to Paris in a Bulletin Magazine photography competition; being appointed official photographer for two NSW Premiers and working as dig photographer on three archaeological expeditions to Jordan.
A graduate of the inaugural Clarion South Writers’ Workshop, she was a Writers of the Future prize winner in 2004. She has edited five anthologies of speculative fiction and sixty-five of her short stories have been published since the turn of the millennium.
Cat has received a total of nineteen Aurealis and Ditmar awards for writing, editing and art including the Peter McNamara Conveners Award 2004, for services to Australia’s speculative fiction industry. She was the convenor of the Aurealis Awards horror division in 2006, a judge in the anthologies and collected work category in 2009 and the short SF division in 2013.
An active member of Science Fiction Writers of America, her fiction is represented by Jill Grinberg Literary Management, New York.
Her short story collection The Bride Price was published by Ticonderoga Publications in May, 2013. The book was nominated for an Aurealis Award and won the Ditmar for Best Collected Work in 2014.
Her story ‘All the Love in the World’ was reprinted in Hartwell and Kramer’s Years Best Science Fiction, Volume 16.
In January 2012 she was one of 12 students chosen to participate in Margaret Atwood’s The Time Machine Doorway workshop as part of the Key West Literary Seminar Yet Another World: literature of the future. Her participation was funded by an Australia Council emerging writers grant.
She is currently studying for a Doctorate of Philosophy – Media, Culture and Creative Arts through Curtin University.
Her debut novel, Lotus Blue, will be published by Talos Press in March 2017.