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Rick Kennett (born 1956) is an Australian writer of science fiction, horror and ghost stories. He is the most prolific and widely-published author in Australia after Paul Collins, Terry Dowling and Greg Egan, with stories in a wide variety of magazines and anthologies in Australia, the US and the UK.

His first published short story was "Troublesome Green" (1979).

In 1981, Melbourne community radio station 3CR broadcast no less than twelve of Kennett's stories to air.

A number of his stories have been printed multiple times due to his habit of resubmission - for instance, "Isle of the Dancing dead" and "The Battle of Leila the Dog".

A number of his ghost stories feature the recurring character Ernie Pine, known as "the reluctant ghost-hunter". Another continuing character in his work is the Lesbian "trained killer for the state", Cy De Gerch.

Some of Kennett's work is science fiction, but some of his science fiction stories feature ghosts, thus his work crosses genre boundaries that are often kept separate.

Kennett was an early contributor to The Australian Horror and Fantasy Magazine and has also had stories published in its successor Terror Australis and the anthology Best Australian Horror. He has collaborated on occasion with other Australian writers of horror, for instance Barry Radburn, Paul Collins and Bryce J. Stevens.

The St James Guide to Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers points out that Kennett is "really the one Australian writer to have produced a substantial body of work in the ghost-story field" - while Rob Hood and Terry Dowling have also produced significant quantities of ghost stories, Kennett's concentration on the genre makes him the leading specialist in Australia.

Reggie Oliver, reviewing 472 Cheyne Walk: Carnacki, the Untold Stories, has called Kennett "prodigally inventive" and Peter Worthy of Black Book webzine has called the book "a dazzling continuation of William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki the Ghost-Finder"

Kennett has worked as an apprentice fitter and turner, and as a long-serving motorbike courier in Melbourne.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Rick Kennett", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0