ANTONY MANN  | Biography

I’m an Australian writer, musician and filmmaker. Born and raised in Sydney, in 1994 I moved to Oxford to live and work in the UK. In 2009, I returned to Australia and settled in the Blue Mountains with my wife and two children.

WRITING

My short fiction and poetry have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Interzone, London Magazine, Chapman, STAND, the Australian Review of Fiction, and many other journals and magazines. In 1999 I won the UK Crime Writers Short Story Dagger for Taking Care of Frank, published in Crimewave, and I was nominated for the same award in 2003. Also in 2003 my book of short fiction Milo & I was published by Elastic Press and was subsequently reprinted by Tokyo Sogensha as a mass-market paperback in 2012. I have appeared twice in the World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories.

While living in the UK I also wrote for The Guardian.

My novel Beachland was published in 2020 and is available in print an eBook from Amazon and digitally from all major platforms.

FILM

In 2003 I wrote the short film Billy’s Day Out (dir. Iain B. MacDonald) which won the Best Short Film award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and which was an official selection in over twenty film festivals around the world.

I am a graduate of the European Audiovisual Entrepreneurs symposium (EAVE) at Luxembourg in 2005, and the Screen South (UK) Good Foundations course of the same year.

In 2018 I founded Grey Ant Films in the Blue Mountains with the aim of making short films using local talent. In 2020 our first film Louise was nominated for the Best Dark Comedy award at the Portland Comedy Film Festival. Our second film Missing (2021) has to date won three awards (Best Original Idea, Best Editing and Best Sound Design) at film festivals globally.

The third Grey Ant film Birds (2022) is already an Official Selection at the Portland Comedy Film Festival and Blue Shorts in the Blue Mountains.

Our fourth film, High Roller (2022-23) has finished shooting and has gone into post production.

A series of other shorts and a feature film (Friends and Other Enemies) are in various stages of production and development.

MUSIC

In the 1980s I was a guitarist and songwriter with Sydney band The Quarks, then later, while living in the UK in the 2000s, I played in Oxford band The Blue Valentines. After returning to Australia, I joined forces with Ian Neilson to form Antelope. Emerging from the shed in 2017, we have been playing our original brand of folk-pop in Sydney and the Blue Mountains ever since.

I also compose songs and write soundtrack music and do sound design for the films I make through Grey Ant Films, write songs and music in a solo capacity, and write and perform with my son Andy Mann.