The Sir Julius Vogel Awards 2011: Nomination Deadline Fast Approaching

 
I have been a very naughty boy.

Well, a slightly naughty boy, anyway. I meant to put up a post about the opportunity to nominate works and people for the Sir Julius Vogel Awards as far back as the end of January, and yet I’m only now getting around to it. Sorry for leaving it so late!

The Sir Julius Vogel Awards are the New Zealand awards for speculative fiction, awarded at each year’s New Zealand national science fiction convention. I was very pleased when Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand, the anthology I co-edited with Mark Pirie, won in the Best Collected Work category in the 2010 Sir Julius Vogel Awards.

Given that the deadline for nominations is the end of March (to be precise, it’s 31 March 2011 at 8.00pm), I’m going to abandon my always-likely-to-be-unrealistic plan of taking a comprehensive look at potential nominees, and just tell you what I’m going to nominate in a few of the categories. Because NZ speculative fiction is so strong at the moment, there are lots of good books/stories/people out there for you to nominate, and I encourage you to go for it! (Suggestions, in any category, are welcome below in the comments).

First of all, SFFANZ and SpecFicNZ have details of the nomination process. The 2010 awards show the categories.

Semaphore Magazine has a guide to eligible works it has published, and Helen Lowe published a very useful guide to the categories, plus a list of some eligible novels in the Adult and YA categories.

The SFFANZ site has a number of lists of potentially eligible works – look at the works published in 2010 in each list.

So that’s plenty of information to be going on with. Here are the works I’m planning to nominate at this stage – I am sure I’ll think of others when I’m face to face with the nomination form:

– Best Adult Novel: The Heir of Night by Helen Lowe

– Best Young Adult Novel: Tymon’s Flight by Mary Victoria

– Best Collected Work: A Foreign Country: New Zealand Speculative Fiction, edited by Anna Caro and Juliet Buchanan

– Best Short Story: “Back and Beyond” by Juliet Marillier, the final story in A Foreign Country.

Time To Write One Of Next Year’s Nominees!

While you’re making your nominations, take a moment to check out the inaugural SpecFicNZ short story contest, which also closes on 31 March.