The Last Stormlord, the first book in Australian fantasy writer Glenda Larke’s new The Watergiver/The Stormlord trilogy has gone to the printers and should hit retail sometime in August in Australia, according to her blog.

The US and UK markets will have to wait until March next year. But wait, there’s more! Information about Larke, known for her two previous series, The Isles of Glory and The Mirage Makers, appears to be popping up all over the place at the moment.

Orbit’s Australian publicist Nicola Pitt, writing on the publisher’s UK blog, notes Larke has said she is starting on the last book of the trilogy already, with her agent and editor being pleased with book two, which has also been handed in.

Then there is Larke’s post on SFNovelists.com, a blog which a number of authors post on. In a post entitled “Where did the Stormlord come from?”, Larke gives a fair amount of background to her latest trilogy.

Here’s just a snippet from the interesting story:

I guess it started when I was kid. We drank rainwater funnelled by guttering from the house roof into a galvanised iron tank. And one long, hot, dry Australian summer in the 1950s, a rat drowned and decomposed in the watertank – and we had to throw the precious water away. Until the next rain, stll a month or two away, we carted water from neighbours – who also went short because they shared. There’s idea number one: water is precious. I hardly remember a time when I didn’t know that.

Orbit’s Pitt also delivered a bunch of other news about Australian science fiction and fantasy authors.

The prolific Sean Williams (you can find out just how prolific he is at his site) has won the Peter McNamara Award for Excellence at the Australian National Convention in Adelaide, while Ian Irvine is “working furiously” on the first book of a new fantasy trilogy for Orbit; it’ll be delivered later this year.

Pitt doesn’t explicitly state it, but it looks as though Orbit has signed Brisbane writer Trent Jamieson, who won the 2005 Aurealis Award for his short story Slow and Ache. Jamieson’s site states he is working on a series called The Players, in association with The Australia Council Literature Board.