Shortlist for Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic announced

Elaine Frei | July 10, 2010 | 0 Comments

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Shortlists have been announced for the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic.

Two awards are given, one for excellence in fantastic fiction for adults and one for excellence in young adult fantastic fiction.

The shortlist for a novel or short-story collection for adults includes The Mystery of Grace(Tor), by Charles de Lint; Indigo Springs (Tor), by A. M. Dellamonica; Makers (Tor), by Cory Doctorow; The Sunless Countries (Tor), by Karl Schroeder; and Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd Century America (Tor), by Robert Charles Wilson.

Those works included in the shortlist for young adult literature are Give Up the Ghost (Henry Holt), by Megan Crewe; Amy by Any Other Name (Key Porter), by Maureen Garvie; Half World (Penguin), by Hiromi Goto; Wondrous Strange (HarperTeen), by Lesley Livingston; and The Hunchback Assignments (HarperCollins), by Arthur Slade.

The jury which decides the awards has also issued a list of Honorable Mentions in each category, made up of books which did not make the shortlist but which they nevertheless felt merited recognition. In the adult category, books on the honorable mention list include Generation A (Random House), by Douglas Coupland; Animals (Véhicule), by Don LePan; Monstrous Affections (ChiZine Publications), by David Nickle; and Northwest Passage (Prime), by Barbara Roden.

Honorable Mention recognition in the young adult category went to Seal Intestine Raincoat (NeWest Press), by Rosie Chard; Haunted (HarperCollins), by Barbara Haworth-Attard; The Gryphon Project (Puffin), by Carrie Mac; and Raven (Simon & Schuster), by Allison van Diepen.

To be eligible for the Sunburst Award, books or short-story collections must be in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror, magic realism or surrealism by an author who is either a Canadian citizen or a Landed Immigrant in Canada. The work must have been published in English or translated into English, and must have been published in book form and substantially text-based, according to the Award’s website.

The jury for this year’s awards, which were named after the novel Sunburst (1964), by Phyllis Gotlieb, one of the first published Canadian science fiction authors, are Don Bassingthwaite, Gemma Files, Sue Moloney, Ursula Pflug and Edward Willett.

The Sunburst Award, first given in 2001, comes with a cash prize of C$1,000 and a medallion.