Evelyn Tsitas is writer, artist, and curator. Her published and performed works range across fiction, nonfiction, stage, and journalism. Evelyn’s short story “Undeceive” won the first prize trophy and Innovation Prize in the 2008 Scarlet Stiletto Awards and while it piqued the interest of publishers it was deemed too innovative – as it was in verse! By that stage, however, Evelyn was on a path to academic research, thanks to her short story “Xenos” which won the Scarlet Stiletto Innovation prize in 2007 and became the basis for Evelyn’s PhD research into speculative fiction and hybridity.
“Xenos” featured a female protagonist on the wrong side of the law who may or may not be quite human, and was written while Evelyn was at a Bioethics conference listening to a presentation about the transplantation of animal parts into humans. Evelyn went on to curate three large-scale thematic exhibitions anchored in her scholarship: Future U (2022), Pleasure (2019) and My Monster: The Human Animal Hybrid (2018) at RMIT Gallery. She currently works at Heide Museum of Modern Art, and is also writing a non-fiction book based on her research, as well as a speculative art-crime novel inspired by her short story Stealing Back the Relics, about regenerated body parts and ancient reliquaries, published in And Then... The Great Big Book of Awesome Adventure Tales! Vol 1 (Clan Destine Press). Evelyn says that there is no doubt that winning the coveted red shoe opened doors within the crime writing sisterhood, and gave her the confidence to stamp herself with the ‘crime writing’ brand – even though her work will always be oddly hybrid and speculative, image-based and narrative.
Credits
Concept designer, co-producer, and narrator: Susanna Lobez
Co-producer: Carmel Shute
Announcer: Leigh Redhead
ProductionManager: Tim Coy
Graphic Designer: Caz Brown
Copyright Sisters in Crime Australia
