Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards

Updated January 23rd with lots more prizes.

Our jury is now busily considering which of this year’s nominees will receive prizes, but before we can give out those prizes we need money. Our awards are not backed by wealthy sponsors, but by individual contributors and small grants. We have had a kind donation from Science Fiction Studies, and a few from private individuals, but most of our money comes from you, the readers.

For last year’s awards we ran a fund raising campaign, and several kind people donated books that we could give away to a few lucky donors. We have decided to repeat that exercise this year, and we have some fine prizes available already. They are:

• A signed US hardback edition of Embassytown from China Miéville
• A signed manuscript of Pirate Cinema, Cory Doctorow’s forthcoming YA novel
• A signed copy of the South African edition of Moxyland, with soundtrack by African Dope on CD, from Lauren Beukes
• A signed copy of the Pyr edition of The Restoration Game from Ken MacLeod
• A signed hardcover of signed Superman: The Black Ring (the complete Lex Luthor run from Action Comics) from Paul Cornell
• A signed copy of By Light Alone from Adam Roberts
• A signed copy of Range of Ghosts, the new novel from Elizabeth Bear
• A signed copy of Songs For the Devil and Death, Hal Duncan’s poetry collection
• Signed copies of the Creature Court Trilogy from Tansy Rayner Roberts (only published in Australia)
• A signed copy of an ARC of the Subterranean edition of Manhattan In Reverse from Peter F. Hamilton
• Ebook copies of the entire catalog of Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s Cheeky Frawg Books (epub or mobi)
• A signed ARC of Nalo Hopkinson’s forthcoming YA novel, The Chaos
• A signed copy of a novel by Juliet E. McKenna (winner gets to choose which book) from Juliet
• A signed copy of Aliette de Bodard’s novel, Master of the House of Darts
• A signed copy of the first edition of Nicola Griffith’s Tiptree-winning novel, Ammonite
• A signed copy of the new Small Beer Press edition of Kelley Eskridge’s novel, Solitaire
• A set of the first four Twelve Planets chapbooks from Twelfth Planet Press (only published in Australia)
• Hardcover editions of Wilde Stories 2011 and Heiresses of Russ 2011 from Lethe Press
• A copy of Transtories, Colin Harvey’s last anthology, from Aeon Press
• A signed copy of the new mass market paperback of The Fallen Blade from Jon Courtenay Grimwood
• A signed copy of Welsh Kings, a Celtic history from Kari Sperring in her academic alter ego
• A signed copy of the New Zealand edition of Heir of Night from Helen Lowe
• A hardback copy of Felix J. Palma’s novel, The Map of Time (English language edition), donated by Rob Latham
• A hardback copy of Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, donated by Cheryl Morgan (who ended up with two by accident)

Huge thanks to everyone who has donated. More prizes may be added during the draw. If anyone would like to donate an additional prize, please get in touch.

The fund raiser will end at midnight on the last day of February, because it seemed cool to end on a leap day. Up until that time, everyone who donates money will go into a draw for one of those prizes. The full rules of the draw are available here.

Our aim, as with last year, is to raise $2000. As you may recall, we managed $1764.01. Let’s at least beat that.

If you are a new visitor, more information about our organization can be found here; and more information about the awards is here.

To donate, simply use this PayPal button. You are able pay with a credit card.

Our jury has asked us to stop taking nominations for works published in 2011 now. The full list of books they have been asked to consider is therefore as given here.

Because translated works are often published in small presses, and our awards are not well known, we don’t always get to hear of eligible works in time. Therefore our rules allow us to carry works over from one year to the next. If you do know of a work that we should have considered from 2011, please do tell us about it. It isn’t too late, we just won’t be considering it for the current set of awards.

If you’re a US taxpayer, remember that donations to the SF & F Translation Awards are tax-deductible as charitable donations. We are a recognized 501(c)(3) organization. For most people, if you want to take that tax deduction on your next tax return, you need to donate by the end of 2011. See our Donations Page for further details and how to donate. In 2011, over 95% of our donation income was spent directly on the Awards themselves (award trophies, certificates, and award grants), with less than 5% spent on overhead costs such as postage, shipping, and governmental fees. (A copy of our latest financial statement is available upon request.) This is because all of the work managing the awards is done by volunteers donating their time and effort. You can help us by donating to keep the work going.

The latest issue of World Literature Today has a special feature covering the Serbian master of the fantastic, Zoran Živković. What’s more, four of the articles relating to Zoran are available free online. Here are the links:

• “Zoran Živković: A Biographical Sketch,” Michael Morrison
• “The Teashop,” a story by Zoran Živković
• “Fantastika and the Literature of Serbia: A Conversation with Zoran Živković,” Michael A. Morrison
• A Bibliography of the Works of Zoran Živković

The Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation is seeking a number of volunteer staff to assist with the running of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards. The positions are detailed below. Please email info [at] sfftawards [dot] org with details of your experience if you are interested in any of these posts.

Facilitator

This person will work with the awards jury to facilitate efficient discussion of eligible works. Duties will include assisting with the recruitment of jurors, obtaining copies of eligible works for the jury, facilitating jury discussions, liaising between the Board of ARESFFT and the jury, and retaining institutional memory from year to year. An experienced Facilitator is preferred, but training can be provided to the right candidate.

Fund Raiser

This person will be responsible for working with the Board to raise the funds necessary for ARESFFT to continue operation, in particular the cash prizes for award winners. Duties will include obtaining donations of give-aways from publishers and authors, and running online fund-raising events.

News Editor

This person will be responsible for keeping an eye out for translation-related news and posting articles to the Translation Awards website. Knowledge of WordPress is preferred.

With the year being more than half over, we need to be collecting lists of 2011-published works that are eligible for our next set of awards. If you know of a work that is eligible, please post a comment on our Nominations page. We’ll be getting in touch with the usual suspects — Haikasoru, Kurodahan, Black Coat and so on — to get their 2011 publication lists, but we need help spotting translated books published through other venues.

Clarkesworld, the Hugo Award winning online magazine, has published a story translated from Chinese. The story is “The Fish of Lijiang”. It was originally written by Chen Qiufan, and was translated to English by Ken Liu.

We asked Ken Liu about the original form of the story. He tells us that it is written in something known as “Modern Standard Chinese”. This is writable by speakers of both Mandarin and Cantonese dialects. In future if we refer to a work being written in “Chinese” it is this language we will be referring to.

Haikasoru reports the sad death of the leading Japanese science fiction writer, Sakyō Komatsu. He was best known for his earthquake disaster novel, Japan Sinks, which sold over 4 million copies. There is a brief obituary in The Independent. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia entry for Komatsu can be found here.

Well, we made it through one year. The winners have been decided, and the prizes presented. Certificates are going out to the honorable mentions. And one happy winner has got back to us. Here is a photograph of the award for Long form sent to us by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud.

Before moving on we should once again thank all of the people who made this year possible. So very warm thanks once again to the authors, editors and publishers who donated books:

Neil Gaiman, Ann VanderMeer, Jeff VanderMeer, Gary K. Wolfe, Peter F. Hamilton, Kari Sperring, Nick Mamatas, Pyr Books, Nanopress and Tachyon Publications.

To the organizations who have sponsored us:

• The Science Fiction Research Association
• The Speculative Literature Foundation
• The Science Fiction Foundation

To our volunteer jurors: Terry Harpold, Abhijit Gupta and and Dale Knickerbocker.

And to everyone who donated money in our fund raiser.

Now we need to get on with next year. More on that soon.

The results of the 2011 Awards have been presented at the 2011 Eurocon in Stockholm. Guests of Honor, Ian McDonald and Elizabeth Bear opened the envelopes. In each category the jury has selected an houorable mention as well as a winner. The results are:

Long Form Honorable Mention

The Golden Age, Michal Ajvaz, translated by Andrew Oakland (Dalkey Archive Press). Original publication in Czech as Zlatý Věk (2001).

Long Form Winner

A Life on Paper: Stories, Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, translated by Edward Gauvin (Small Beer Press). Original publication in French (1976­-2005).

Short Form Honorable Mention

“Wagtail”, Marketta Niemelä, translated by Liisa Rantalaiho (Usva International 2010, ed. Anne Leinonen). Original publication in Finnish as “Västäräkki” (Usva (The Mist), 2008).

Short Form Winner

“Elegy for a Young Elk”, Hannu Rajaniemi, translated by Hannu Rajaniemi (Subterranean Online, Spring 2010). Original publication in Finnish (Portti, 2007).

Special Award

In addition to the standard awards, the Board of ARESFFT presented a special award to British author and translator Brian Stableford in recognition of the excellence of his translation work.

Each winning author and translator will receives a cash prize of US$350 (As both author and translator Mr. Rajaniemi gets $700).

Mr. Gauvin and M. Châteaureynaud were unable to be in Stockholm, but both sent words of thanks:

Edward Gauvin: “My deepest thanks to all the readers and editors who believed in these stories along the way, especially the folks at Small Beer. To Susan Harris and Paul and Sylviane Underwood. To Georges-Olivier, for writing them, and for his encouragement and support. And to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards, who have honored us with this inaugural edition of a prize with a terrific future ahead of it.”

Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud: “Many thanks to my mother, to Small Beer Press, and to the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards. Sometimes, it is as much in an insightful review as in a translation — in this case, in a language I’ve a few glimmers of, having studied English at the Sorbonne — that one has the feeling of having been understood. I feel I’ve found a kindred spirit in Edward Gauvin, miraculously capable of comprehending and conveying what I’ve tried to express in these tales.”

Hannu Rajaniemi was present to accept the award. We will get some words from him soon, but he’s being interviewed by Charles Stross on stage right now.

The jury have sent some comments about the chosen works.

Long Form Winner

Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, A Life on Paper: Stories, translated by Edward Gauvin

The stories in this collection — the first-ever English translations of Châteaureynaud’s work — are written with such delicacy and economy of prose that the reader may be unprepared for the marvelous — and often disquieting — irruptions of unreality that break into experiences of the narrators and characters. This is unapologetically fantastic fiction, but so subtly-crafted that even outrageous violations of reason — a man sprouts tiny wings, a siren swims ashore, a guillotined head complains of its decomposition, a mummy in a double-bass case sings beautifully in Breton — seem manifestly verisimilar; it all just fits together with cunning perfection. Edward Gauvin’s translations are models of the discipline, masterfully attuned to Châteaureynaud’s stylstic shifts, scrupulous ambiguity, and dark humor.

Long Form Honorable Mention

Michal Ajvaz, The Golden Age, translated by Andrew Oakland

A brilliant, ambitious work of utopian fiction and an extraordinary shaggy dog story, complexly and confidently told. The peculiar architecture of the unnamed island, the islanders’s strange language-games and mutable writing system, knowing manipulations of would-be colonizers, and the method of the island’s sole, parodically hypertextual, historical novel — called simply the Book — are realized on so many registrers and with such care that Ajvaz’s novel seems as much a shorthand encyclopedia of modern thought on language, mind, and fiction-making, as an entertaining, Swiftian travelogue. Andrew Oakland’s translation deftly crosses all of these fictional and nonfictional orders without a misstep, capturing the novelist’s wry humor and philosophical rigor.

Short form Winner

Hannu Rajaniemi, “Elegy for a Young Elk”, translated by Hannu Rajaniemi

A brilliant crossing of multiple sf and fantasy genres, marked by canny humor, melancholy, and a looming sense of menace, and shot through with beautiful and memorable images and exchanges. Rajaniemi’s evocative prose hints at a richly-conceived backstory of a technological apotheosis that has refashioned real and virtual worlds — many of the details of which are only hinted at but never seem underimagined. A rare work of short fiction that grows more complex on successive readings.

Short form Honorable Mention

Marketta Niemelä, “Wagtail”, translated by Liisa Rantalaiho

An intensely-told, unsettling parable of the family in an age of hyperreality and affective alienation. Rantalaiho’s precise translation of Niemelä’s spare, detached prose admirably captures the narrator’s anxiety and imperfect understanding of the bonds that join her to the daughters — and kinds of motherhood — between which she must choose.

Special Award — Brian Stableford

Brian Stablefords contributions to science fiction and fantasy in the roles of author, editor, and historian-scholar may well be unequalled; certainly, no other living writer has matched the variety and scope of his prodigious output of original fiction and scholarship. For the last decade, Stableford has devoted much of his considerable talents and energy to an unprecedented project of literary resurrection, translating more than sixty books of proto and classic sf, horror, and fantasy by French authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most of the authors and titles are unknown to English-speaking readers; only a handful had been previously translated; many of these texts are now almost impossible to find in the original French. Yet they include among them more than a few of the most historically significant and influential works of modern imaginative fiction in that language. They are invaluable to our understanding of the sources and development of world science fiction and fantasy.

Despite their sheer, daunting number fully seventeen of the texts nominated for this years long form Award were translated by Stableford his translations are complete and faithful. His critical introductions and annotations are models of discernment, and invaluable to the scholar and enthusiast alike. The intellectual sweep and literary success of this translation project are, in a word, astonishing; there is nothing comparable to it in the history of sf and fantasy translation, and it stands as a benchmark for the labor that these Awards aim to honor. Thus it is appropriate that with this Special Award in recognition of the excellence of his translation work, we congratulate and celebrate Brian Stableford’s ongoing service in support of world science fiction and fantasy.

The jury for the awards was Terry Harpold, University of Florida, USA (Chair); Abhijit Gupta, Jadavpur University, India; and Dale Knickerbocker, East Carolina University, USA.