Dr Eugen Bacon identifies as African Australian and has made peace with carrying more than one identity at once: mother, writer, editor, scholar, mentor. Most days she moves between multiple roles before lunch. It’s that same ease with holding more than one role that shaped one of the more demanding editing projects of her career, and the one she now points to as a genuine turning point.
In April 2022, Eugen pitched Bloomsbury Academic an anthology idea: a collection of creative essays from African writers of black speculative fiction, exploring Afrofuturism from lived experience rather than secondhand analysis. She called it “African voices: Afrofuturism in our stories.” Years back, the publisher had already acquired her first creative nonfiction title, Writing speculative fiction, but acceptance of a subsequent project was never guaranteed. Bloomsbury Academic sent the proposal out for peer review in the UK and South Africa. After a long wait, they came back ready to talk acquisition.
What followed tested Eugen in a way her own doctoral editing hadn’t. She sourced 10 contributing writers from across the African diaspora and asked each for a chapter that wove scholarly argument together with creative excerpts from their own work, to sit alongside 2 chapters of her own. Running the project meant applying rigorous academic editing (structural integrity, citation mechanics, factual substantiation) while also writing as a contributor herself.
“It meant stepping back from my writerly instinct to reshape another’s prose, choosing instead the editor who nurtured their distinct argument, to bring out the best shape of their work, and keeping the book structurally cohesive,” she says of the experience.
That’s the distinction Eugen keeps coming back to: writing wants to be heard; editing wants you to hear someone more clearly. Knowing which hat to wear, and when, is exactly the kind of judgement that doesn’t become less necessary just because the tools and formats around our work keep changing. If anything, as client expectations shift and new formats multiply, that judgement matters more.
Two years after that first pitch, the finished book was published under Bloomsbury Academic’s Black Literary and Cultural Expressions series as Afro-centred futurisms in our speculative fiction. It won the 2025 Locus Award for Non-Fiction and the 2025 Ignyte Award for Outstanding Creative Nonfiction. It was a finalist for the 2025 Next Generation Indie Book Awards and the 2024 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards. The book was also shortlisted (Best Short Non-fiction) and longlisted (Best Long Non-fiction) at the British Science Fiction Association Awards. It was named among Brittle Paper’s 100 Notable African Books of 2024 and Open Country Mag’s 60 Notable African Books of 2024, and is now part of the Bloomsbury Collections. For Eugen, the real marker of success was simpler than any award: every one of those 10 writers still sounded like themselves on the page. As an editor, she did not intrude on their voices.
Eugen joined IPEd in January 2019 and describes this membership as one of the best things she’s done for herself. Being part of a community of editors who understand exactly what “structural edit” or “citation mechanics” means in practice made a real difference while she was deep in a project of this scale, and that community has run in both directions. She’s given back through a speaker presentation called “Seduce the writing – for editors,” delivered the 2025 IPEd conference keynote on editors as changemakers, and sat on a conference panel on diversity, equity and inclusion in the profession.
Editing, like writing, Eugen says, can be quiet, solitary work. Having a professional community that understands exactly what that work involves, and that gives you somewhere to both learn and contribute, is what makes it less so.
Your profession. Your community. Your IPEd.
Know someone who works with words but isn’t a member yet? Forward this to them or point them to https://www.iped-editors.org/become-a-member/.