About

(the author, circa 2011, at a cafe pretending to work)

Ian McHugh’s first success as a fiction writer was winning the short story contest at his local science-fiction convention in Canberra, Australia in 2004. Two years later, he was accepted into the Clarion West writers’ workshop and his work subsequently appeared in a variety of magazines, webzines, podcasts and anthologies in Australia and internationally. His stories won grand prize in the Writers of the Future contest and were shortlisted six times at Australia’s Aurealis Awards (scoring a win for Best Fantasy Short Story), with reprints in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, Award Winning Australian Writing and elsewhere. Several of his stories were collected in the volume Angel Dust, from Ticonderoga Publications.

Ian initially paid for his writing habit by working for the Australian Government in various guises, including as an intelligence officer and, later, as a program manager in a range of fields, such as adult literacy, vocational education, biodiversity research and university research networks. In 2014 he moved into lecturing and tutoring at university, and was awarded a doctorate in 2021. He currently lectures in creative writing and runs work-integrated learning for arts, communications, media, design and built environment students at the University of Canberra.