There have been some exciting developments on the Aussie horror front today.

First of all, the Australian Shadows Awards are open for business (nicely coinciding with the opening of the Aurealis Awards and nominating period for the Ditmar Awards).

The judging line-up is awesome: Stephanie Gunn and Craig Bezant return for their second year and they are joined by ScaryMinds’ Jeff Ritchie. The guest judges are Chuck McKenzie, Kaaron Warren, and Rocky Wood.

Most significantly, for the first time, the AHWA is offering a prize pool of $750 for the winners ($250 each for the winners of the three categories). It’s an exciting time for Aussie horror!

The other cool piece of news is that zombiephile Chuck McKenzie has created a spin-off review site from HorrorScope dedicated to zombie reviews. NecroScope will feature all zombies, all the time, and should be a fun place to drop into if you like all things undead. Bookmark it now: http://zombiefictionreview.blogspot.com/

Well, twelve months of work has culminated in the winners of the Australian Shadows Award being announced today.

Congratulations to Kaaron, Amanda, and Deborah – it’s an all female finale for the first time in the award’s history.

The judges reports (all six of them!) are well worth checking out for a decent snapshot of the state of Aussie horror.

Thanks again to all the judges – especially the preliminary panel of Steph, Craig, and Chuck who did a lot of literary heavy lifting. The team has been a pleasure to work with.

As Director of this year’s awards, I’m very proud to see that the expansion of the award (to three categories) has been favourably received, and that the standard of the shortlists was incredibly high.

I’ve been involved with the Australian Shadows for the past three years now (two consecutive years as a judge; this year was my first as Director) and the award just keeps getting better and better. I’m continuing on as Director for 2010 and there’s definitely more improvements on the way. The award opens to submissions in June, so keep an eye out for announcements in the next two months!

In case anyone missed the plethora of announcements, media releases, and emails today, the finalists have been announced for the 2009 Australian Shadows Awards!

Congratulations to all the nominees.

As the Director, I’d like to acknowledge and thank the Herculean efforts of judges Craig Bezant, Stephanie Gunn, and Chuck McKenzie in coming up with the shortlists. I’d also like to thank everyone who submitted work for consideration.

The winners will be announced on April 5. Best of luck, folks.