Sunday, January 25, 2009

Aurealis Awards

Well deserved congratulations to all the winners, especially Western Australians, K. A. Bedford, Best Science Fiction novel for Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait, Jonathan Strahan, editor Best Anthology for The Starry Rift and Shaun Tan, Best Illustrated Book for Tales From Outer Suburbia (even if he has abandoned us for brighter lights). Best collection winner, Magic Dirt by Sean Williams was published locally by Ticonderoga Publishing run by Russell B. Farr and also deserves a mention in the West Aussie list of achievers.

Edit: In West Aussie successes I omitted to mention Trent Jamieson who is not a West Australian but took out Best Young Adult Short Story for Cracks in Shiny Issue 2 put out by Twelfth Planet Press which is Western Australian.

It was good to see Simon Brown, one of the Clarion South 2007 tutors, win Best Science Fiction Short Story for The Empire in Dreaming Again. Coincidentally I had just finished reading this without realising it was a finalist and enjoyed it thoroughly.

The complete list of winners is here but after looking at that you could go here and make the list of finalists a reading checklist. This was a extremely strong field and the judges must have had a very difficult time separating out the winners from such quality. I've read enough of the finalists to want to read the rest. I think you'd enjoy them too.

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