AustLit

Novelist, short-story writer, critic, and podcaster.

Roberts has been active in the Australian speculative-fiction scene, in writing groups, and as a regular contributor to journals, webzines, and ezines. As a founding member and occasional editor of the journal Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, she has contributed fiction, conducted interviews of actors and authors, and reviewed books.

A founding member of the wRiters On the Rise (ROR) group, Roberts and collaborators Trent Jamieson, Maxine McArthur, Margo Lanagan, Dirk Flinthart, Rowena Cory Daniells, and Marianne de Pierres originally met to give critical assessment of manuscripts. They then moved on to create the fictional world of Shimmaron, with each author contributing a novel that explains and explores this new world and its peoples. This concept is called 'shared world' in science-fiction circles. Roberts provided the first book in the series, Seacastle, in 2007.

Roberts, Flinthart, and Gillian Polack have also been involved in the 'shared world' of New Ceres, a webzine created by Alisa Krasnostein, which covers the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror on the earth-colonised planet New Ceres. New Ceres is an eighteenth-century-style culture, complete with a technology black market, a sinister priesthood, and refugees from the recently invaded Earth struggling to come to terms with this new lifestyle.

Her fiction includes a series of works set in her fantasy kingdom of Mocklore, as well as other ongoing series (including Musketeer Space, Castle Charming, Creature Court, and Belladonna University), as well as standalone works, especially in short fiction. She has also published a series of interconnected short stories influenced by her PhD in Classics, Love and Romanpunk. One work from the collection, 'The Patrician', won the international Washington Science Fiction Small Press Award, as well as being shortlisted for an Aurealis Award. Her short diction and novels have been shortlisted for and won DitMar Awards, Aurealis Awards, Norm K. Hemming Awards, and–for her debut novel, Splashdance silver, the George Turner Prize.

In addition to her fiction, Roberts is a frequent critic of popular culture in a variety of media, including essays and podcasts: her series of essays on [Terry] Pratchett's Women were released as an ebook by FableCroft in 2014 (after first appearing on her blog), and she has been regularly shortlisted for the Ditmar Awards' William Atheling Jr Award for criticism, including two simultaneous nominations in 2016 for 'SF Women of the 20th Century' and 'Sarah Kingdom Dies at the End' (on Doctor Who). In late 2016, her essay 'One Girl in the Justice League' appeared in the Book Smugglers' second quarterly almanac.