Speaking of Awards…

A Major Award.
A Major Award.

Though I’m paying particular attention to the Nebula Awards at the moment, various and sundry other awards are in the offing or have been recently announced for worthy works of literature, both speculative and literary.

Some people look askance at the whole awards culture, which can devolve into a popularity contest, circular back-pat, or narcissistic me-fest, but I think it’s worth recognizing writers and stories that rise above the mundane to the magnificent. Heaven knows authors struggle against what often feels like an eternal gale of criticism, and if history is any indication, many of our finest may only be recognized as such posthumously.

There’s a cheery thought.

Here are a few awards I keep an eye on, as they relate to speculative fiction and/or Christian fiction:

The Hugo AwardThe Hugo Awards: Another of the “Big 3” science fiction and fantasy awards. The Hugo focuses on science fiction, plus related works, television, movies, and graphic media. Unlike the Nebulas, which are voted on by the membership of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the Hugos are selected by the World Science Fiction Society, composed of the membership of the previous, current, or next year’s World Science Fiction Convention (this year, it’s LoneStarCon3, in San Antonio, Texas, in September). There’s usually some overlap among Nebula and Hugo nominees, and I’ll cover this year’s Hugos in a later post.

The World Fantasy AwardThe World Fantasy Awards: This is the equivalent of the Hugo or Nebula for fantasy stories and art. Nominees are selected by a panel of judges and members of the current World Fantasy Convention (in Brighton, U.K. this year, at the end of October). Winners are selected by the panel of judges.

The Christy AwardThe Christy Awards: Named in honor of author Catherine Marshall, and her classic novel, Christy, the Christys recognize “excellence in Christian fiction” across a variety of genres, recognizing and promoting works “of exceptional quality and impact.” The Christy website explains the process: “Every year publishers are invited to submit novels written from a Christian worldview and copyrighted in the year preceding the awards. Each novel is entered in one of several genre categories and/or the first novel category. Each category of novels is then read and evaluated against a ten-point criteria by a panel of seven judges composed of librarians, reviewers, academicians, literary critics, and other qualified readers, none of whom have a direct affiliation with a publishing company.”

Administration of the Christy is a little odd and has stirred some consternation among readers and writers of Christian fiction who know about it. More to follow on this issue in a separate post.

The Carol AwardThe Carol Awards: Presented by the American Christian Fiction Writers (a professional organization of Christian writers “devoted to the craft of Christian Fiction”) to recognize “the best Christian fiction published by traditional publishing houses.” Stories are evaluated against a standardized scoresheet by a panel of judges appointed by the ACFW.

Clive Staples AwardThe Clive Staples Award: Administered by the Speculative Faith online forum, the Clive Staples Award is an annual “readers’ choice” award for excellence in speculative fiction written from a Christian worldview, with nominees and winners chosen by vote of the readership at large (if you read, this means you, whatever size you happen to be, and the nomination process is underway right now), based on criteria explained here.

The Sir Julius Vogel AwardThe Sir Julius Vogel Awards: Huh? Never heard of this one? That may be because it’s presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of New Zealand for excellence in science fiction, fantasy, and horror writing by New Zealanders. It also considers anthologies published in New Zealand containing works by New Zealand authors. Among this year’s nominees is Splashdown Books’ Avenir Eclectia anthology, which includes some of my stories.

I’ll let you know how that turns out.

UPDATE: Alas, it didn’t. You can find the 2013 Vogel Award winners here.

Advertisements

3 thoughts on “Speaking of Awards…

  1. Um, erm….this is weird. I did a whole blog post on awards today, too. 🙂

    I love your chosen image there at the beginning, btw. Only you would think of that ;).

    1. And double-weird, I was just reading your post and about to comment, which I will go back and finish doing now. 🙂

      I loathe that movie, but it does have its moments, and I can no longer think about any sort of award without it coming to mind. Thanks, Hollywood. 😛

    2. It is a movie I both love and loathe. I must watch it every year, but the whole time I think how corny and annoying it is :P.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s
https://frederation.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/speaking-of-awards/
frederation.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-43
75804
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:D7R3RFBOVRYAO72ZDGEMEMIC7ZYT2RLC
<urn:uuid:3bede91f-7428-4843-b70e-e8776d2794f1>
2017-10-24T00:31:01Z
192.0.78.12
text/html
sha1:5URIDKTF2WZWEUL36RLPOSAPWWNQNYS5
<urn:uuid:caf17b4e-f500-4f4a-9b9f-971873d8b900>
https://frederation.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/speaking-of-awards/
length
response
<urn:uuid:c92d06a1-6078-4128-9b79-538f73a71237>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-37-188-157.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-43
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf