Paul Haines, New Zealand-Australian author (b. 1970)
Paul Haines (8 June 1970 – 5 March 2012) was a New Zealand-born horror and speculative fiction writer. He lived in Melbourne with his wife and daughter.
Raised in Auckland, New Zealand, Haines moved to Australia in the 1990s after completing a university degree in Otago, where he became an Information Technology consultant. He attended the inaugural Clarion South writers workshop in 2004 and was a member of the SuperNOVA writers group. Haines had more than thirty short stories published in Australia, North America, and Greece. In 2007, he volunteered as a mentor for the Australian Horror Writers Association.Haines won the Australian Ditmar Award three times (Best New Talent in 2005, and Best novella/novelette for "The Last Days of Kali Yuga" (2005) and "The Devil in Mr Pussy (Or How I Found God Inside My Wife)" (2007)). He won the 2004 Aurealis Award (horror short story) for "The Last Days of Kali Yuga" and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2003 and 2004. Several of his short stories received Honourable Mentions in the annual Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies, ed. Ellen Datlow, Gavin Grant, and Kelly Link (St. Martins).
Haines' first short story collection Doorways for the Dispossessed was published by Prime Books in 2006. It won the New Zealand 2008 Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Collection and was nominated for the 2007 Australian Ditmar for Best Collection.
In 2007 Haines was diagnosed with cancer. The anthology Scary Food: A Compendium of Gastronomic Atrocity (ed. Cat Sparks, Agog! Press, 2008) was put together as part of a donation drive to raise funds to partially cover the cost of Haines' medical treatment. Authors represented include Kaaron Warren, Margo Lanagan, Robert Hood, Richard Harland, Paul Haines, Terry Dowling, Stephen Dedman, Deborah Biancotti, Lee Battersby, Lucy Sussex, Gillian Polack, Lourdes Ndaira and Anna Tambour. Haines died in March 2012.
He was influenced by Iain Banks, Clive Barker, James Herbert, Stephen King, George R. R. Martin, Robert Silverberg, Peter Straub, and Irvine Welsh.