Paul Ikin

Paul Ikin is an illustrator by trade & speculative fantasy author based in Melbourne, Australia.

He spent most of his formative school years in the grimy depths of video arcades playing Ghouls'n Ghosts, smashing his electric guitar, breeding axolotls and memorising chapters from the Necronomicon.

It was a passion for cartoons, Sci-fi and Fantasy that consumed Ikin's young life and led to him fulfilling his dream of owning a vintage and rare oddities toy shop. It was not too far in the distant future, he found himself as an unemployed toyshop owner, with limited dragon drawing skills.

Not easily defeated, he enrolled in art school and followed a dream, (of which he found he had talent) as an illustrator.

In continuing his onslaught of magnificence, he wrote, designed and illustrated a fantasy novel like no other called, The Other Side of Eve. With over 600 pages of pure epic fantasy and dark Baroque illustrations, a new sub-genre was formed (Ikinist writing). Subsequently a loyal and cult-like following developed since the release of his debut novel. (They wear robes and speak in tongues)



In his book, The Other Side of Eve, Ikin approaches the subconscious habits and anxious thought processing mind, as he and others have endured, in an abstract fantasy that follows the lives of two troubled teenagers. Intertwined chapters follow the anxious Evelin Boots and the housebound Belleny Vera as they struggle to find peace and tranquillity within their own minds, let alone their own worlds.

As a qualified Illustrator Ikin lets his creative mind free in Belleny's world of Mare-Marie, and from experience he brings an abstract reality that we can all assimilate to, if only in our dreams. Ikin has had the opportunity to not only write but draw over eighty chapter illustrations that show us a glimpse of his own vision of The Other Side of Eve, and it's weird and wonderful characters.

If you choose to follow Eve to the other side, you have taken the right path.

Ikin is a current member of Writer's Victoria and spends a great deal of time creating art & concepting narratives within the cosy confines of his Melbourne City art studio. As an emerging indie author, his fervent first novel is quite an achievement.