Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Award Fund Raiser

From Cheryl Morgan:

Running awards doesn’t cost a lot of money. We are fairly self-sufficient, though we are very grateful to CanSMOF (the parent corporation of Anticipation, the 2009 Montréal Worldcon) for donating the money to cover the various filing fees we needed in order to get set up. However, there is one area in which we could do with some money. Next year we will be giving out our very first awards. We would very much like our winners to receive not only glory, but a nice check as well. Translation is not very well paid, despite being a highly skilled task, and many of the authors whose works are eligible would be very grateful for a cash prize as well. So we are going to do some fund raising. There’s a “donate” button in the right-hand sidebar of this website. Please give generously.

In order to make the process of giving a little more interesting, a number of people have kindly donated some prizes to be given to donors selected at random. We’ll be ending the fund raising campaign at midnight on January 14th, 2011. Winners will be notified shortly thereafter.

As of now the following prizes are on offer:

• A signed copy of a book donated by Neil Gaiman (title to be announced later)
• A signed copy of Finch, donated by Jeff VanderMeer
• A selection of 5 issues of Weird Tales (including the International issue). Donated by Ann VanderMeer
• A signed copy of Evaporating Genres, donated by Gary K. Wolfe
• A selection of 3 SF books translated from Japanese, donated by Haikasoru
• A copy of Pierre Pevel’s The Cardinal’s Blades (translated from French), donated by Pyr Books
• A copy of Joe R. Lansdale’s Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal (Tachyon)

More prizes will be added as the fund raising campaign progresses, so keep checking back.

Our initial target is to raise $2000. That would allow us to give prizes of $500 to each winning author and translator. More money would, of course, enable us to give bigger prizes and/or set us up for subsequent years.

For the full rules of the prize give-away, click here.

If you are new here, more information about our organization can be found here; more information about the awards is here; and the list of books and stories being considered for this first set of awards is here.

 

Weird Tales, #356, Summer 2010

In the dark fantasy genre, the magazine Weird Tales holds a preeminent place. Founded in 1923, and supportive of talents as diverse as H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, and Gene Wolfe, this magazine both encourages and reflects the modern suspicion that the universe is pretty weird.

Expanded Horizons, #24, November 2010

Expanded Horizons (“speculative fiction for the rest of us”) is a webzine that aims to represent and foster greater diversity in the sf field. The six stories in its November issue certainly achieve that, as well as showcasing a range of approaches and styles. Malon Edwards brings a touch of magic to his short tale of a college football star. Zen Cho tells of a “smell magician” who takes a stray cat home—even though she doesn’t like cats. Eliza Victoria contributes a poignant and very human take on the notion of parallel universes. Silvia Moreno-Garcia shows how humans can be just as mysterious as we might expect aliens to be. Omar Zakaria’s tale of fantasy adventure takes a serious turn and ends up interrogating itself. And perhaps best of all is Csilla Kleinheincz’s tale of two lovers driven apart by magic that may or may not be real. Rounding out the issue is “The Key Keeper,” an excellent piece of artwork by James Ng.

The Utopiales convention, November 10th to 14th, 2010 – science fiction in Nantes

In our last article about imaginary literature in France, we mentioned the Utopiales convention which takes place every year in November, in the town of Nantes. The city itself is particularly rich as far as the genre is concerned: birthplace of Jules Verne, it houses the bookstore L’Atalante – which is also since the eighties one of the main publishers of the genre in France (among others, it publishes the works of Terry Pratchett).