Hi.

My name is Ben Peek. I’m a Sydney based author.

I write mostly fiction, of which I have had two novels published. The first was an autobiography called Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and was published by Wheatland Press, and illustrated by Anna Brown. A lot of people seemed to like it. Rave magazine called it “Fascinatingly mundane,” and Strange Horizons said it was, “A bit too clever.” The first one was actually a positive review, the second not so much. You can read more in the reviews section of the site. My second novel was a dystopian novel called Black Sheep, of which Paul DiFillippo at Barnes and Nobles Online compared me to Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro, because why not? Unfortunately, the book was with a publisher who did a bad turn on it, and the promised print run of three thousand, which would take it into book stores, never eventuated. About half a dozen people in berets currently have copies and then maybe one or two of them had read it, there. The short of it is that the publisher, Prime Books, turned out to be shit, and I was stupid and signed a bad contract, having not had an agent to tell me otherwise. Live and learn, as they say. As I write this, I’ve just finished another book, and the agent is going off to make me money.

I have also written a few short stories, some of which have appeared in collections like Polyphony, Agog!, Forever Shores, and magazines such as Aurealis, Fantasy Magazine, Phantom, and Lone Star Stories. A
few of them have been reprinted in Year’s Best collections. Selling short fiction is pretty drama free, I’m afraid.

However, I have also written essays and reviews. This has been for places such as the New York Times Sydndicate (the New York Times, but not published in the New York Times, yeah?), Overland, Strange Horizons, and Metro, most recently. The Metro did not actually publish my review of Words from the City, a documentary about hip hop in Australia. They told me that while the review was well written and funny, they’d like it to be more positive of the film itself, which seemed ridiculous, so I got a kill fee and later published it on my blog. For other reviews I have written people have accused me of not supporting local authors, for being a general kind of cunt because I did not say pretty and flowery things about their work.

Drama, hey?

In 2007 and 2008, I ran an online comic with Anna Brown, and we published it online because, in comics, you can do that kind of thing and not be accused of self publishing. It was an autobiographical comic, and you can read the entire thing still, if you like. It’s a little different from my other work, but that’s what I like about it, and it’s good for the creative part of you to do it. In 2000, for example, I created a zine called the Urban Sprawl Project, which was a mix of photography and prose, and aimed to be a work of psychogeography. I printed it up and, with a mate who helped take the photos, walked round streets putting it into letter boxes to be read. It was entirely anonymous at the time, and we got a bit of hate mail for it, but truthfully, I think most people didn’t give a shit. Still, who cared? It was pretty cool to make. We did a couple of issues before the time and cost factor got to us.

Somewhere after that I decided to take the base idea and do a phd, where I wrote my third novel, A Year in the City, a mosaic novel based on race and Sydney. It’s a difficult sell, but the agents and I keep trying, because it’s a pretty sweet book. I got a doctorate at the end and I went to the bank and had them replace my ATM card so that it read Dr. Benjamin Peek. While I was there, the girl behind the counter informed me that I could have anything put on it, from Lord Admiral of the Fleet, to Lord and Lady. It was pretty hard to turn down the idea of being Lord Admiral on a piece of plastic, but in the end I decided to stay with the doctorate, because, hey, I had this piece of paper, and after paper you need plastic, if only so you can say to girls you meet that you really are a doctor, in the hope that they’ll think you’re more financially secure than you really are.

Lastly, I’m represented by Scribe Agency.