Eugen Bacon, MA, MSc, PhD, is an African Australian author, editor, prose poet, scholar and tutor. She is a mother, a daughter, a sister, a mentor and a friend.

She’s a British Fantasy and Foreword Indies Award winner, a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, and a finalist in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for her novel Serengotti, as well as the Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick and Nommo Awards. Eugen was announced in the honor list of the Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Danged Black Thing made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’. She was awarded the 2024 Hedberg fellowship by the University of Tasmania.

Eugen has published Writing Speculative Fiction and Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction (2024) by Bloomsbury Academic. This year, she has A Place Between Waking and Forgetting, an Afro-Irreal collection of dark speculative fiction, in which transformative stories of culture, climate change and unlimited futures inhabit.

She is an associate editor and a reviews editor for Aurealis, Australia’s longest-running speculative fiction magazine. She teaches creative writing and editing, and appears as a guest lecturer at various universities. Eugen engages with creative writing students and runs writing clinics through Writers Victoria, Writing NSW and Marion—an institute for elevating writers and their art. In 2023, she conducted a mentorship program for writers from culturally diverse backgrounds, and in March ran the inaugural Literature Lessons through Writers Victoria. She was chief judge of the Peter Carey Short Story Prize 2024, a longlisting judge of the award in 2023 and has convened or been in the jury of various Aurealis Awards. She’s on the Board Advisory of Meniscus Journal, run by the Australasian Association of Writing Programs.

Visit her at eugenbacon.com.