IFWG is very pleased to receive the news that Kaaron Warren and Ellen Datlow’s chapbook collection of microfiction and photographs of antique tools, Tool Tales, has won the Best Collection category of the 2022 Ditmar Awards. This is the second award that the title has received, as it won the Best Collected Work category in the Shadows Awards earlier this year (the peak awards for the Australasian Horror Writers Association).

Gerry Huntman, Managing Director of IFWG, said, “When Tool Tales got the award at the Shadows, I was momentarily taken aback. I genuinely didn’t believe the title was going to win because it was a chapbook consisting of thirty pages. This feeling was short-lived, because I realised it wasn’t about size but quality – and it is also about the growing trend of appreciation of microfiction, poetry, graphics, and the coalescence of these elements in speculative fiction (be it by way of mixing two or more forms in the same monograph or via hybridisation). I’m thinking about Eugen Bacon’s wonderful mix of microfiction and hybrid poetry in our earlier chapbook, Black Moon, and our upcoming anthology of poetry, short and microfiction, Turning of the Seasons by J.S. Breukelaar and Seb Doubinsky.

“But I shouldn’t be distracted by our other publications – Tool Tales won a second national award – the Ditmars – which indicates to us that the title stands tall and the reading public embraces experimental genre literature, particularly when it is so well executed. We congratulate Kaaron Warren for her fine words, and acknowledge the quality photography and research that Ellen Datlow contributed to the work (and that both facets are inextricably bonded to each other).

“I would also like to congratulate Rebecca Fraser, Alan Baxter, Aiki Flinthart (she will be missed), and Pamela Jeffs, who were deservedly part of the preliminary ballot in the Best Collected category.”