#Aurealis Awards

[meeghanreads]

Top 5 award winning books

Hello friends!! Welcome to Top 5 Tuesday!! This week’s topic is top 5 award winning books!!  Now, by no means am I a literary snob (I don’t think any of us are). And sure, winning an award is nice — validating even. But it also doesn’t increase my enjoyment of a book. In fact, as many award winning books are classified as ‘literary fiction’, I don’t tend to read them. I’m definitely more about…

[manic-intent]

The sixth World SF story bundle is out, and my space opera novel ION CURTAIN is part of the collection! So if you haven’t read it yet, please consider picking it up--and all the great books that are keeping it company :D 

Pay as much as you want ((minimum of $5 for 4 books, minimum of $20 for all 10)), and you can choose to use 10% of what you pay to support English PEN, the founding centre of PEN international, a charity that supports the freedom to read and write worldwide. 

Check it out here: https://storybundle.com/scifi 

Selected reviews:

Unto the Godless What Little Remains by Mário Coelho

"Rock'n'roll for the eyes."

– The Times

Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

"Haunting and beautifully nuanced, Signal to Noise is a magical first novel."

– The Guardian

Ion Curtain by Anya Ow

"An addictive space opera"

– Publishers Weekly

Nova Hellas: Stories from Future Greece by Francesca T Barbini and Francesco Verso

"Often underwater, sometimes entirely virtual, facing calamities from austerity to beepocalypse, near future Greece comes to life in these stories. Forget everything you learned in school, on vacation, or from the faded memories of your immigrant γιαγιά. Λοιπόν, this is the real deal."

– Nick Mamatas, author of The Planetbreaker's Son and The Second Shooter

The Love Machine & Other Contraptions by Nir Yaniv

"In short, this collection of short stories is: outstanding. Buy more copies than one if you give special books to people you respect... I don't mean 'outstanding' in relation to other books this year, but in relation to any in any."

– World Fantasy Award nomineee Anna Tambour

& This is How to Stay Alive by Shingai Njeri Kagunda

"A beautiful and rending look at family, loss, and grief, all while sharply dissecting time travel tropes and delivering a powerful message about memory, storytelling, and responsibility. It's a story that hurts in the best of ways, confronting death and healing without losing its sense of humor or its impulse for rebellion."

– Charles Payseur, author of The Burning Day and Other Stories

And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed

"And What Can We Offer You Tonight is a deep dive into sacred revenge, a vivid, devastating and exquisite story of love and loyalty, among three friends who can ill afford such luxuries."

– L.X. Beckett, author of Gamechanger and Dealbreaker

Hadithi & the State of Black Speculative Fiction by Eugen Bacon and Milton Davis

"Eugen Bacon and Milton Davis come together for Hadithi & The State of Speculative Black Fiction to share a compelling addition to the commentaries and canon of black literature"

– Aurealis

Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders by Aliette de Bodard

"Delightful… Beautiful writing, weird and magical world, fascinating culture and politics, and compelling characters: what more do you need?"

– KJ Charles, author of Slippery Creatures

HebrewPunk by Lavie Tidhar

"Imagine Hard-Boiled Kabbalah... If you like your otherworld fun noir, have I got a book for you!"

– Kage Baker, author of In the Garden of Iden

[ashenhartkrie]

Guys holy shit An Unexpected Party has been shortlisted for an Aurealis Award!!!!

[not-poignant]

🙋‍♀️ for the fanfic ask game

🙋‍♀️ Do any irl people know you write fanfic?

Yes!

A good friend of mine has written Loki/Darcy fanfic (and I believe she started writing fanfiction in the first place because I did). But she is actually a Quite Serious Award Winning Writer Of Original Fiction and adjudicates the Aurealis Awards and a few other things who I am lucky enough to be the beta of (so when I see her book/s in stores I can be like 'I helped edit that' lmao), so like... fanfiction was/is very much a rare diversion for her, and she's not active in fandom.

Another irl friend of mine has written My Hero Academia fanfic.

And another irl friend has written Merlin fic and I think some other fanfict as well!

And one of my partners has over 200 works on AO3 and is amazing. Their user number on AO3 is so old, it's under 200.

I know very talented people even if I don't get to see them very often. We actually don't all read each other's fic, lol. Or if we do, only infrequently.

-

From the fandom meme!

[laurajfitzwilson]

Writeblr intro

Hi! I'm Laura and I'm hoping to get involved in writeblr now that I have a first draft under my belt that I can talk about. I'm involved in local writing communities, but I'd love to make some friends online too.

I'm a whisper away from 30 and I write from Wadawurrung Country in Australia. I'm a little sad to see that there doesn't seem to be active tags for Aussie writers, because I think we have a specific brand of humour and it'd be great to connect.

Humour's pretty central to my writing. I like to have gut punching drama as well, but it's pretty rare for me to not offset it with humour. I think the contrast strengthens both kinds of writing. In any case, I like to laugh at my own jokes and I'm not stopping any time soon.

My short story "All My Tuesdays" was published a couple of years ago and was shortlisted for the Aurealis awards, which was an incredible honour.

My current WIP is a fantasy romance novel, The Fool. I've created a sideblog for it: @thefooljinglescloser and the pinned post for it has a blurb. Basically, an unwilling king has to deal with the magicians who killed half his family, political bullshit, a romance he doesn't have time for with a mystery man, and the castle fool, who is out to humiliate him at every opportunity. It's funny, romantic and dramatic.

I've put a lot of effort into the magic system, but the fantasy elements and setting are the least important parts of the book. I have tried and will continue to try to make this a distinctly Australian kind of fantasy setting, colonialism and all, without that being too major a theme. I'm not out to have the characters challenge their flawed society, I just want to write something that is relevant to my setting instead of going with the very UK-centric vibes that most traditional fantasies use.

Anyway, please follow me and/or @thefooljinglescloser if you're interested in any of this! I'll probably follow you back if you do, because like I say, I'm keen to be a part of the community. 💛

[petermball]

Eclectic Projects 005

Eclectic Projects returns after a short hiatus with four original short stories and more from Aurealis and Ditmar award-winning author Peter M. Ball. Dive into this issue to find: A young boy fighting to free his mother from the subterranean prison of the underesea in The Last Stairman.    Friendship and teenage angst put the test beneath hovering alien vessels in Life In The Shadow. A rockstar…

[zahri-melitor]

What I always think tends to be hugely under appreciated by US narratives on this:

It is hard to explain exactly how much Enid Blyton kids in Commonwealth countries were still reading in the 1990s, but we’ll start with ‘a LOT’ and go from there. It’s an outgrowth of parents picking up their OWN favourite old stories from childhood and reading them to their kids. What are mainstays of Blyton? Boarding schools and mystery-solving pre-teens and teens.

From the perspective of a 90s kid who had been raised on Blyton, the first three Harry Potter books hit exactly that sweet spot of ‘instantly familiar but modernised’. They were treading a hugely familiar groove, but these ones had magic and unicorns. It’s exactly the same familiarities that Diana Wynne Jones was exploiting. It made them very, very easy to read.

I will also agree with everyone else who has pointed out the local Australian market was reasonably robust for SFF in what became the young adult scene, if rather tilted toward post-apocalyptic tales; however I will note after having checked the Children's Book Council of Australia winners for the 1980s and 1990s in Younger and Older Readers (that would be the 8-12 and 13-18 categories) and the Aurealis Awards Young Adult category, that while there is a reasonable amount of depth there's still a lot of repetition in names.

Names and titles from that period off the top of my head:

Brian Caswell had Merryl of the Stones come out in 1989 and then kept publishing through the 90s. My personal favourite is A Cage of Butterflies.

Emily Rodda was a mainstay particularly for the middle grade readers: the Rowan of Rin series started in 1993 and Deltora’s Quest started in 2000

Gillian Rubenstein: Galax-Arena is the most famous, which was 1995, but I’d also point to the Space Demons trilogy

Garth Nix published Sabriel in 1995 and Shade's Children in 1997

Isobel Carmody had the Obernewtyn Chronicles running through the 90s (find an Australian YA fantasy reader from the 90s and ask about the wait for the Stone Key)

I want to add Kate Forsyth as the Witches of Eileanan started in 1997 but were very much that crossover juveniles/adult fantasy coming of age story. I still lose it giggling thinking about how Forsyth names her snowboarding tribe the Khan’cohban (it's the name of a local town near the main NSW ski fields turned into a fantasy name)

Ruth Park's Playing Beattie Bow is another 1980s classic

Robin Klein, with Halfway Across the Galaxy and Turn Left among others

Catherine Jinks with among other the Pagan's Chronicles series and Witch Bank

Michael Pryor had the Doorways Trilogy and The Mask of Caliban during the 90s

Despite all this, the entire concept of the YA genre definitely gained momentum of its own in the wake of Harry Potter and created so much more space for itself. The opportunities definitely increased.

I have ~Thoughts~ on the Harry Potter Phenomenon that was

(Courtesy of memories prompted by this Tumblr Poll)

Back when I was a senior in college (back in the mid-to-late 1980s), I actually wrote a fantasy novel for kids aged ~8 - ~11 (in a self-designed course for a single credit, under the guidance of my Literature advisor), inspired by a series of dreams and recurring characters that showed up in them.

My advisor encouraged me to try and get it published. And so, I arranged with teachers from my old school to have a class of 30 or so 10 year-olds beta read it, and give me feedback for revisions. The kids also encouraged me to try and publish it.

So I did.

Now, back then, there was no "Self Publishing." The closest thing was "Vanity Publishing," where you would pay 100% of the publishing cost of your book, which would be printed in hard copy, for the benefit of having 500 -1,000 books shipped to your personal address, which you were then responsible for storing and selling out of the trunk of your car in a parking lot, somewhere. And if word got out that you were trying to claim credit for being a "published author" because of a Vanity Press book, actual publishers wouldn't touch you with a 40-foot pole.

If you wanted to get published, you had to buy that year's copy of Writer's Market: a listing of magazine and book publishers, and agents, with a brief description of what material they published, and what they wouldn't touch.

Guess what genre no agent or publisher was interested in handling?

That's right, Gentle Readers: Fantasy for children aged 8 - 11. I would have happily sent out a dozen queries for each story I wrote, if there were publishers and agents willing to look at them. But for three to four years of trying, in directories of two-columns of tiny print, and several pages long, I'd be lucky to find two or three outlets even willing to look at fantasy for kids.

The general consensus, across the publishing business, was that fantasy was a dead and obsolete genre. If it was for kids old enough to read chapter books and novels, it must also be firmly grounded in realism and actual history, because everyone knows the only people buying books for kids that age were teachers, who wanted stories with practical applications in the classroom.

***

After 3 - 4 years of trying, while I was in grad school, I finally got a rejection from the one agent who agreed to read my novel. A few days later, I received news that my mother had died from the breast cancer she'd been fighting, and my heart just went out of the project altogether.

A few years later, the first Harry Potter book was published. And it became a worldwide phenomenon. And it was the kids, themselves, who were driving the sales.

See, I think the real reason the books were such a success, even though they were never really very well written, was because they were in a genre the audience was hungry for -- a genre they'd been denied access to for all of their young lives.

Someone who is starving will think even moldy bread is delicious.

[sebastiangrad604]

Craig Phillips

Craig Phillips has worked as a professional illustrator for the US and Australian publishing industries for twenty years. His client list includes Random House, Scholastic, Simon and Schuster, Hachette, Hardie Grant, Bloomsbury, Oxford University Press and many more. His work has appeared in art anthologies such as The Society of Illustrators Annual, Spectrum Fantastic Art Annual and Luerzers 200 Best Illustrators Worldwide, and has been exhibited at the Museum of American Illustration. Phillips also worked on Neil Gaiman’s American Gods in 2017. His first solo work, titled Giants, Trolls, Witches, Beasts: Ten Tales from the Deep, Dark Woods (Allen and Unwin, 2017) won the NZ Book Award’s Russell Clark Award for Illustration, a Gold Ledger in the Australian Ledger Awards, a Notable Book in the CBCA Awards and was also a finalist in the Aurealis Awards.

Most recently How Do I Feel? A Dictionary of Emotions was awarded as a Notable Book in the Storylines Book Awards 2021 and was also a Finalist in the 2022 NZ Book Awards for Children & Young Adults.

[mawsonbear]

Short List Excitement

From The Waste Land: three Waste Land stories make the Aurealis cut This week, the savvy judges of the Aurealis Awards (Australia’s premier speculative fiction awards) announced their short lists in the various categories for 2022 publications: https://aurealisawards.org/2023/03/09/2022-aurealis-awards-shortlist-announcement/ And I’m deeply THRILLED to see that THREE stories from the anthology…

[millennial-book-review]

She Who Became the Sun

I (finally) read She Who Became the Sun and I need to talk about it.

She Who Became the Sun is a 2021 fantasy novel by Shelley Parker Chan. It is the first entry in The Radiant Emperor series. It was the author’s debut novel. Upon release, it was a nominee for several literary awards including the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the 2021 Goodreads Choice Award for Fantasy and the 2021 Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel. “I refuse to be nothing…” In 1345, China…

[gollancz]

@feltpool thank you for enabling me.

I'm delighted to announce that we have acquired the Checquy Files series by Daniel O'Malley, and will be reissuing the first two titles - THE ROOK and STILETTO - with new covers, alongside the first UK releases of books three and four, BLITZ and ROYAL GAMBIT, in summer 2025.

I've long been a huge fan of these books and used to cite them as the sort of book I wanted from agents, so you'd better bet that I made myself UNBEARABLE until I got my grubby mits on them.

THE ROOK (or, my unofficial subtitle, The Adventures of Myfanwy Thomas: Administrator Extraordinaire) won the 2012 Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and the moral of the story is you can win the day as long as you always keep the receipts. (no, seriously).

The Checquy Files are each stand-alone books within the same amazing world, following a secret organisation that is responsible for anyone with supernatural powers within the UK. They are chaotic, funny, smart and blend thriller and fantasy with wonderfully bizarre powers. It's like... if people in the X-Men didn't always have useful mutations. Or if The Umbrella Academy was a national initiative.

Genuinely, if you love The Umbrella Academy, you will probably love these.

You might recognise the title - THE ROOK was made into a TV series by Starz starring Adrian Lester and Jolie Richardson, but don't worry about spoilers, it went a very different way. (Although, frankly, surprised Tumblr wasn't all over the sex scene with Gestalt, a single consciousness shared between four bodies.)

ANYWAY! Here's the blurb for THE ROOK, you can pre-order our editions... soon. And they're GREAT.

---

It's the middle of the night.

It's pouring with rain.

You've woken up in the middle of a field, alone, surrounded by dead bodies.

And you have no idea who you are.

Myfanwy Thomas doesn't know what has happened to her. All she has is a collection of letters, written by her past self, to guide her through the improbable world in which she suddenly finds herself. They contain information - on her life, on the improbable powers she has at her fingertips, and on the mysterious organisation she works for.

They also contain a warning: someone is trying to kill you. Desperately trying not to be discovered, Myfanwy has to navigate the rigours of her life and job, while trying to find out which of the faces closest to her past self betrayed her . . .

. . . before they try again.

It's been a week since I did a cover reveal. Wanna see some more?

[bookstand]

2019 Aurealis Awards Winners

2019 Aurealis Awards Winners

The link below is to an article reporting on the winners of the 2019 Aurealis Awards.

For more visit: https://aurealisawards.org/2020/07/25/2019-aurealis-awards-winners/

[tsanasreads]

More Awards News - Aurealis Series and Tiptree

I am a little slow posting this news, but I didn't want it to pass without mention. Not long ago, I posted about the Aurealis Awards short list. The shortlist for the Sara Douglass series award came out a bit later and, though I missed it at the time, I wanted to share it with you all. This is only the second time the Best Series Aurealis will be awarded, so it's very interesting to look at the composition of the shortlist. (You can see the first shortlist at the bottom of this page.) I've included this year's shortlist below, and you can also see it here.

The other award which was recently announced is the Tiptree Award. This one is a bit unusual in that they announce the winner, an honour list and a long list all in one go. The winner this year is Gabriela Damián Miravete for her short story “They Will Dream In the Garden”. You can read the Honour and Long List at the Tiptree website.

2018 Sara Douglass Book Series Award shortlist

Blackthorn & Grim [Dreamer’s Pool (2014), Tower of Thorns (2015), Den of Wolves (2016)], Juliet Marillier (Pan Macmillan Australia)

Captive Prince [Captive Prince (2014), Prince’s Gambit (2014), Kings Rising (2016)], C S Pacat (Penguin Random House)

Electric Empire [The Diabolical Miss Hyde (2015), The Devious Dr Jekyll (2015), The Dastardly Miss Lizzie (2017)], Viola Carr (HarperCollins Publishers)

The Fire Sermon [The Fire Sermon (2015), The Map of Bones (2016), The Forever Ship (2017)], Francesca Haig (HarperCollins Publishers)

Zeroes [Zeroes (2015), Swarm (2016), Nexus (2017)], Deborah Biancotti, Margo Lanagan & Scott Westerfeld (Allen & Unwin)

Content imported from Blogger https://ift.tt/2FxynKL. If you would like to leave a comment, please do so at the aforementioned link.

[rivqa]

The obligatory award eligibility post

The obligatory award eligibility post

First, let’s get the easy stuff out of the way. I had just one story of my own published in 2018, ‘To Rain Upon One City’ in Resist Fascism (psst, have you seen this gorgeous cover by Geneva B?) It’s eligible for the short story categories of the Locus, Hugo, and Ditmarawards. I was deeply honoured that my editors Bart Leib and Kay Holt saw fit to open the anthology with my far-future, Jewish…

[stephanie-gunn]

Tin Duck win

Over the last six months, I have written exactly one story. To be precise, I have rewritten this story – I initially worked on This Silent Sea over the last span of time before my daughter was born last year, at which time it was a short story (and for me, mostly an exercise in trying to write a story to a limited word count). The last few months of my pregnancy were hard, and the first few…