Occupation WriterEditor Name Shane Cummings Nationality Australian Role Author | Period 2003 to present Partner Angela Challis Literary movement Dark fiction | |
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Genre Horror fictionFantasySpeculative fiction Books Apocrypha Sequence: Deviance Similar People Stephen King, H P Lovecraft, Matthew Reilly | ||
Shane Jiraiya Cummings (born 24 April 1974) is an award-winning Australian horror and fantasy author and editor. He lives in Sydney with his partner Angela Challis. Cummings is best known as a short story writer. He has had more than 100 short stories published in Australia, New Zealand, North America, Europe, and Asia. As of 2015, he has written 12 books and edited 10 genre fiction magazines and anthologies, including the bestselling Rage Against the Night.
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Early life
Born in Sydney, Australia as Shane Cummings, he has used "Jiraiya" as his part of his legal name since his Iga-ryu Ninjutsu and Sports Chanbara sensei Kazuo "Crando" Saito bestowed the name to him in the early 1990s when he attained his black belt in Ninjutsu.
He lived for many years in Perth, Western Australia and Wellington, New Zealand, before returning to Sydney in 2015.
Education
Cummings graduated from Whitireia New Zealand's Creative Writing programme with a Bachelor of Applied Arts (Creative Writing) in 2014.
Writing and publishing
In 2004, Cummings co-founded Australian independent publisher Brimstone Press and Shadowed Realms online magazine with partner Angela Challis. In 2005, Cummings founded HorrorScope: The Australian Dark Fiction Blog, a news and review blog. He has edited the fiction anthologies Rage Against the Night, Shadow Box, Black Box, Robots and Time, and Australian Dark Fantasy & Horror 2006 edition, and the co-edited the magazines Shadowed Realms, Midnight Echo (issue 2) and Black: Australian Dark Culture.
Cummings is a member of the Australian Horror Writers Association, the Horror Writers Association (US), and a graduate of the Clarion South writers workshop (2005).
Cummings has won two Ditmar Awards (for HorrorScope in 2005 and 2006), and in 2015, he won the Australian Shadows Award - Paul Haines Award for Long Fiction - for his novella Dreams of Destruction. He has been nominated for more than twenty other genre awards for his writing and editing, including Spain's Premio Ignotus.
In 2007, Cummings was the Convenor of the Horror judging panel in the Aurealis Awards. He was a judge for the Australian Shadows Awards in 2007 and 2008. Cummings continued on with the Australian Shadows Award as Director in 2009 and 2010.
Shane Jiraiya Cummings served as Vice President of the Australian Horror Writers Association from 2008 to 2010 .
Cummings self-published seven e-books simultaneously in January 2011.