IFWG Publishing is extremely pleased to have acquired the publishing rights for five titles by Kaaron Warren, one of which is a collaboration with multi-award winning editor Ellen Datlow.

Three Warren titles are transfers of rights from a previous publisher (Slights, Mistification and Walking the Tree) and two are original works: Morace’s Story (a middlegrade novella that closely ties with Walking the Tree, where both will be published worldwide simultaneously), and Tool Tales, a chap-book that will contain original photography by Ellen Datlow paired with micro-fiction by Warren—all associated with images of old tools that are odd, weird, or whose utility are largely forgotten over time. Warren’s prose sources inspiration and stream of consciousness from these images.

All five titles will be published on return to normalcy in the marketplace following the current COVID-19 crisis, but Slights will be available in ebook format in coming months. All three reprints will be augmented with new creative material, notably a bonus related short fiction piece for Slights, and Walking the Tree will be closely associated with Morace’s Story—it will be the same story as Walking the Tree, but through the eyes of a young protagonist. IFWG views this pairing as an exciting project with an original approach to bridging literature across different age groups. IFWG will provide more news on enhancements to Mistification at a later date.

Tool Tales brings Ellen Datlow into the project as an artistic contributor, which contrasts with her usual expert role as an editor. IFWG was approached by Warren and Datlow following their social media success in matching Kaaron’s speculative fiction writing against Datlow’s collection of images of tools, to turn this exercise into a print and ebook collection. IFWG recognised the potential interest in this project in the wider reading community, and also saw it as a superior reference work for writers’ workshops and classes.

IFWG Publishing views these acquisitions as a strong investment, injecting two projects with unique offerings to the market (Morace’s Story’s pairing with Walking the Tree, and the creative collaboration between Warren and Datlow in Tool Tales). Additionally, IFWG values the addition of five titles bearing Warren’s respected name to its current catalogue of two books (the multi-award winning novel, The Grief Hole, and her collection of short fiction, The Gate Theory).

Kaaron Warren’s Bio:

Shirley Jackson award-winner Kaaron Warren published her first short story in 1993 and has had fiction in print every year since. She was recently given the Peter McNamara Lifetime Achievement Award and was Guest of Honour at World Fantasy 2018, Stokercon 2019 and Geysercon 2019. Kaaron was a Fellow at the Museum for Australian Democracy, where she researched prime ministers, artists and serial killers.

She has published five multi-award winning novels (Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, The Grief Hole and Tide of Stone) and seven short story collections, including the multi-award winning Through Splintered Walls. She has won the ACT Writers and Publishers Award four times and twice been awarded the Canberra Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Her most recent novella, Into Bones Like Oil (Meerkat Press) is on the Final Ballot for the Stoker Award, the Recommended Reading List for Locus and the Aurealis Award Shortlist.

Ellen Datlow’s Bio:

Ellen Datlow has been editing sf/f/h short fiction for four decades. She was fiction editor of OMNI Magazine and SCIFICTION and currently acquires short stories and novellas for Tor.com and Nightfire. She has edited many anthologies for adults, young adults, and children, including The Best Horror of the Year series and Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles, and the reprint anthologies Edited By and Body Shocks. She’s won multiple Locus, Hugo, Stoker, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Awards plus the 2012 Il Posto Nero Black Spot Award for Excellence as Best Foreign Editor. Datlow was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention for “outstanding contribution to the genre” and was honored with the Life Achievement Award given by the Horror Writers Association, in acknowledgment of superior achievement over an entire career and honored with the World Fantasy Life Achievement Award at the 2014 World Fantasy Convention.

She runs the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in the east village, NYC, with Matthew Kressel.