Nominations 2010

These are the works from 2010 that were suggested to the jury. Long Form Yukikaze by Chōhei Kambayashi, translated from the Japanese by Neil Nedelman

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The Finalists

We are delighted to be able to announce the finalists for our first set of awards. They are as follows:

Long Form

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

The Ice Company, G.-J. Arnaud [Georges-Camille Arnaud], translated by Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier (Black Coat Press). Original publication in French as La Compagnie des Glaces (1980).

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

Four Stories till the End, Zoran Živković, translated by Alice Copple- Tošić (Kurodahan Press). Original publication in Serbian as Četiri priče do kraja (2004).

Short Form

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

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

“Bear’s Bride”, Johanna Sinisalo, translated by Liisa Rantalaiho (The Beastly Bride: Tales of the Animal People, eds. Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Viking). Original publication in Finnish as “Metsän tutt” (Aikakone (Time Machine), 3/1991).

“Midnight Encounters”, Hirai Tei’ichi, translated by Brian Watson (Kaiki: Uncanny Tales from Japan, Vol. 2, Kurodahan Press). Original publication in Japanese (1960).

The winning works will be announced at the 2011 Eurocon in Stockholm on the weekend of June 17-19. Each winning author and translator will receive a cash prize of US$350. ARESFFT Board member, Cheryl Morgan, will be present to make the announcement.

In addition to the standard awards, the Board of ARESFFT will present a special award to British author and translator, Brian Stableford. No less than seventeen of the nominees in Long Form from 2010 were translated by Stableford. The ARESFFT Special Award for Services to Translation will therefore be presented to Stableford in recognition of the excellence of his translation work.

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.

2013 Winners

We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2013 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards (for works published in 2012). There are two categories: Long Form and Short Form. The jury has additionally elected to award three honorable mentions in each category.

Long Form Winner

Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City by Kai-cheung Dung, translated from the Chinese by Anders Hansson, Bonnie S. McDougall, and the author (Columbia University Press)

Long Form Honorable Mentions

Belka, Why Don’t You Bark? by Hideo Furukawa, translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich (Haikasoru)

Kaytek the Wizard by Janusz Korczak, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Penlight)

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, translated from the Russian by Olena Bormashenko (Chicago Review Press)

Short Form Winner

“Augusta Prima” by Karin Tidbeck translated from the Swedish by the author (Jagannath: Stories, Cheeky Frawg)

Short Form Honorable Mentions

“Every Time We Say Goodbye” by Zoran Vlahović, translated from the Croatian by Tatjana Jambrišak, Goran Konvićni, and the author (Kontakt: An Anthology of Croatian SF, Darko Macan and Tatjana Jambrišak, editors, SFera)

“A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” by Xia Jia, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu (Clarkesworld #65)

“A Single Year” by Csilla Kleinheincz, translated from the Hungarian by the author (The Apex Book of World SF #2, Lavie Tidhar, editor, Apex Book Company)

The winners were announced today at Liburnicon 2013, held in Opatija, Croatia, over the weekend August 23-25. The awards were announced by ARESFFT Board member Cheryl Morgan and convention Guest of Honor, Jacqueline Carey. Zoran Vlahović was in the audience.

The winning authors and their translators will each receive an inscribed plaque and a cash prize of $350. Authors and translators of the honorable mentions will receive certificates.

“Anyone who doubts the vitality of worldwide science fiction and fantasy,” said Gary K. Wolfe, President of ARESFFT, “could do worse than to use this impressive list of winners and honorable mentions as a reading list. The breadth and variety of the translated works themselves, as well as their venues of publication, attest to the valuable efforts of many to bring a genuine international dimension to genres that have sometimes (and sometimes accurately) been described as provincial in attitude.”

The money for the prize fund was obtained primarily through a generous donation by Society for the Furtherance & Study of Fantasy & Science Fiction (SF3). SF3 is the parent non-profit corporation of Wiscon, the feminist science fiction convention.

The jury for the awards was James & Kathryn Morrow (Chairs); Felice Beneduce, Alexis Brooks de Vita, Stefan Ekman, Martha Hubbard, Ekaterina Sedia, Kari Sperring, and Aishwarya Subramanian. Comments from the jury on the chosen works follow.

Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City

In praising Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, Jurist Kari Sperring called it a “hugely innovative, playful, intensely political, accomplished book, and the best piece of fantastical history/historiography I have ever read. The translation is excellent, too: elegant, fluent, and lively. I applaud the preservation of Cantonese pronunciation (a decision which is itself a political act). Moreover, novel and translation are actively engaged with each other—the act of translation has produced changes in the Chinese as well as the English texts.”

“Disrupting the concept of the novel,” Jurist Alexis Brooks de Vita wrote of Atlas, “irresistibly quotable, Dung Kai-cheung’s amazingly yearning creation of short chapters toys with conceptions of place and being, with feeling and mythmaking, centered in the fictional story of one of the most painfully politicized cities still in existence in the world.”

For Jurist Aishwarya Subramanian, Atlas is a book that “clearly delights in its own cleverness.” But beyond the breathtaking inventiveness, she found the text “intensely political and engaged with the present – it’s fifteen years old, but it still feels to me contemporary and relevant.”

Co-chair Kathryn Morrow discovered in Atlas “a masterwork on the nature of translation itself. The prose is beautifully rendered into English, and the author’s essential subject is the process by which myth, legend, and fact translate themselves into human cultural artifacts.”

Jurist Martha Hubbard concluded, “This beautiful and elegiac book examines the very nature of how knowledge is created … The language is at once poetic and specific. The book is so moving, I would deeply love to own a proper copy to keep and cherish.”

Belka, Why Don’t You Bark?

Kari Sperring singled out Belka, Why Don’t You Bark? for its “thoughtful engagement with the issue of abandonment” and she also appreciated the author’s insights into “the consequences of globalization and social exclusion.” Kari argued that, while Belka presents itself “as military fiction and gritty crime drama,” the book is ultimately “a pacifist narrative.” She added, “The excellent translation negotiates the difficulty of a narrative that switches between third person and second person, past tense and present tense.”

In confronting Belka, Martha Hubbard noted that “this strange and compelling book grows on you. I think it is a powerful and brave attempt to comment on the aftermath of the wretched situation in the world after decades and decades of war.”

Kaytek the Wizard

Alexis Brooks de Vita found Kaytek the Wizard “sublimely poignant, as painful as it is raw, so obviously written by a man who loves childhood and children and uses fantasy to prepare them—and us—for fatality as well as mortality. Huckleberry Finn more than Tom Sawyer, reaching across a century-and-a-half to conjure Harry Potter, Kaytek’s loner protagonist finally becomes not only Frankenstein but his self-created monster, a childish Melmoth the Wanderer, made wise enough to have become capable of conveying the author’s historically heartbreaking final lines.”

Kathryn Morrow added, “This is a fresh, sophisticated, and psychologically authentic exemplar of the Bildungsroman type of fantasy. The author’s unique sensibility is well served by Lloyd-Jones’s lively translation.”

Roadside Picnic

Negotiating the new translation of Roadside Picnic, Jurist Felice Beneduce took pleasure in “the Raymond Chandleresque approach of the authors, whose writing oozes noir.” He added, “The notion of aliens being completely indifferent to the consequences of their actions and in essence their ‘trash’ is brilliant in my view.”

Co-chair James Morrow was pleased to report that the Olena Bormashenko rendering of Roadside Picnic “restores scenes and sentences that, owing to the machinations of Soviet censorship, never appeared in Antonina W. Bouis’s earlier version.”

Martha Hubbard provided a personal coda. “As someone living in a region which had the dubious pleasure of hosting the Soviet Army’s roadside picnics, the picture posited of the mess they created and left behind is far too accurate.”

Short Lists for 2013

The Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation (ARESFFT) is delighted to announce the finalists for the 2013 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards (for works published in 2012). There are two categories: Long Form and Short Form.

Long Form

Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City by Kai-cheung Dung, translated from the Chinese by Anders Hansson, Bonnie S. McDougall, and the author (Columbia University Press).

Belka, Why Don’t You Bark? by Hideo Furukawa, translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich (Haikasoru).

Kaytek the Wizard by Janusz Korczak, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Penlight).

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, translated from the Russian by Olena Bormashenko (Chicago Review Press).

Seven Terrors by Selvedin Avdić, translated from the Bosnian by Coral Petkovich (Istros Books).

Three Science Fiction Novellas by J.-H. Rosny aîné, translated from the French by Danièle Chatelain & George Slusser (Wesleyan University Press).

The Whispering Muse by Sjón, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb (Telegram).

Note: The version of Roadside Picnic in question is a brand new translation of this well-loved work, and therefore eligible for the award despite the existence of a previous English language version.

Short Form

“Augusta Prima” by Karin Tidbeck translated from the Swedish by the author (Jagannath: Stories, Cheeky Frawg).

“Autogenic Dreaming: Interview with the Columns of Cloud” by TOBI Hirotaka, translated from the Japanese by Jim Hubbert (The Future Is Japanese, Nick Mamatas and Masumi Washington (eds.), Haikasoru).

“Every Time We Say Goodbye” by Zoran Vlahović, translated from the Croatian by Tatjana Jambrišak, Goran Konvićni, and the author (Kontakt: An Anthology of Croatian SF, Darko Macan and Tatjana Jambrišak (eds.), SFera).

“The Flower of Shazui” by Chen Qiufan, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu (Interzone #243).

“A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight” by Xia Jia, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu (Clarkesworld #65).

“A Single Year” by Csilla Kleinheincz, translated from the Hungarian by the author (The Apex Book of World SF #2, Lavie Tidhar (ed.), Apex Book Company).

The nominees were announced at Finncon 2013 in Helsinki, over the weekend of July 6-7 during a discussion about international science fiction. ARESFFT Board member Cheryl Morgan and jury member Stefan Ekman, who was a Guest of Honor at Finncon, were present, as was Short Form nominee, Karin Tidbeck. Other countries represented at Finncon this year include Latvia, Estonia, Russia, China, France, Canada, the UK, and the USA.

The winning works will be announced in August. Each winning author and translator will receive a cash prize of US$350.

ARESFFT President Professor Gary K. Wolfe said: “The number of fine works that our jury has to consider is increasing each year. We are delighted to be able to bring such fine fiction from a wide range of different cultures to the attention of the English-speaking world.”

The money for the prize fund was obtained primarily through a generous donation by Society for the Furtherance & Study of Fantasy & Science Fiction (SF3). SF3 is the parent non-profit corporation of Wiscon, the feminist science fiction convention.

The jury for the awards was James & Kathryn Morrow (Chairs); Felice Beneduce, Alexis Brooks de Vita, Stefan Ekman, Martha Hubbard, Ekaterina Sedia, Kari Sperring, and Aishwarya Subramanian.

The Winners Are…

Here are the results for the 2012 awards (for works published in 2011). The jury has elected to give two Honorable Mentions in each category.

Long Form Winner

Zero by Huang Fan, translated from the Chinese by John Balcom (Columbia University Press)

Long Form Honorable Mentions

Good Luck, Yukikaze by Chohei Kambayashi, translated from the Japanese by Neil Nadelman (Haikasoru)

Midnight Palace by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves (Little, Brown & Company)

Short Form Winner

“The Fish of Lijiang” by Chen Qiufan, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu (Clarkesworld #59, August 2011)

Short Form Honorable Mentions

“The Boy Who Cast No Shadow” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, translated from the Dutch by Laura Vroomen (PS Publishing)

“The Green Jacket” by Gudrun Östergaard, translated from the Danish by the author and Lea Thume (Sky City: New Science Fiction Stories by Danish Authors, Carl-Eddy Skovgaard ed., Science Fiction Cirklen)

The winners were announced today at Finncon 2012, held in Tampere, Finland. The awards were announced by jury member Irma Hirsjärvi and ARESFFT Board member Cheryl Morgan.

The winning authors and their translators will each receive an inscribed plaque and a cash prize of $350. Authors and translators of the honorable mentions will receive certificates.

Jury chair Dale Knickerbocker said, “The jury would like to thank all who nominated works, and compliment both the authors and translators for the fine quality of this year’s submissions. While both the winner and honorable mentions in the long fiction category had their supporters, we ultimately chose Huang Fan’s novella Zero (translated from the Chinese by John Balcom) as the winner. The author skillfully weaves elements from the masterpieces of dystopian fiction into his own very unique text, and the translator successfully communicates the work’s stark, frightening nature. Zero‘s surprise denouement takes Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle a step further, wedding it with a touch of Asimov’s The Gods Themselves.”

“This year’s winner in the short fiction category, Chen Qiufan’s “The Fish of Lijiang” (translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu) was described by our judges as “brilliant,” “original,” and “a lovely and devastating story, beautifully written and translated.” It presents an interesting take on mental illness and wellness, work, and future technologies. In the tradition of the best SF, it offers a convincing extrapolation of the economic and consequent social changes that China has undergone in the past 30 years.”

ARESFFT President Professor Gary K. Wolfe added: “I’m delighted that the hard work of our distinguished jurors has resulted in such an impressive list of winners and nominees, and–equally important–that the international science fiction and fantasy community has taken this award to heart in terms of supplying nominees and suggestions for nominees. Congratulations not only to the winning authors and translators, but to everyone who has helped make these awards a viable and invaluable project.”

The money for the prize fund was obtained primarily through a 2011 fund-raising event for which prizes were kindly donated by George R.R. Martin, China Miéville, Cory Doctorow, Lauren Beukes, Ken MacLeod, Paul Cornell, Adam Roberts, Elizabeth Bear, Hal Duncan, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Peter F. Hamilton, Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, Nalo Hopkinson, Juliet E. McKenna, Aliette de Bodard, Nicola Griffith, Kelley Eskridge, Twelfth Planet Press, Deborah Kalin, Baen Books, Small Beer Press, Lethe Press, Aeon Press, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Kari Sperring, Helen Lowe, Rob Latham and Cheryl Morgan.

The jury for the awards was Dale Knickerbocker (Chair); Kari Maund, Abhijit Gupta, Hiroko Chiba, Stefan Ekman, Ekaterina Sedia, Felice Beneduce & Irma Hirsjärvi.

2012 Nominees

We are delighted to announce the finalists for the 2012 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards (for works published in 2011). There are two categories: Long Form and Short Form.

Long Form

Good Luck, Yukikaze by Chohei Kambayashi, translated from the Japanese by Neil Nadelman (Haikasoru)

Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik, translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti (Bloomsbury Qatar)

The Dragon Arcana by Pierre Pevel, translated from the French by Tom Clegg (Gollancz)

Midnight Palace by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves (Little, Brown & Company)

Zero by Huang Fan, translated from the Chinese by John Balcom (Columbia University Press)

Short Form

“The Fish of Lijiang” by Chen Qiufan, translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu (Clarkesworld #59, August 2011)

“Spellmaker” by Andrzej Sapkowski, translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel (A Polish Book of Monsters, Michael Kandel, PIASA Books)

“Paradiso” by Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud, translated from the French by Edward Gauvin (Liquid Imagination #9, Summer 2011)

“The Boy Who Cast No Shadow” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, translated from the Dutch by Laura Vroomen (PS Publishing)

“The Short Arm of History” by Kenneth Krabat, translated from the Danish by Niels Dalgaard (Sky City: New Science Fiction Stories by Danish Authors, Carl-Eddy Skovgaard ed., Science Fiction Cirklen)

“The Green Jacket” by Gudrun Östergaard, translated from the Danish by the author and Lea Thume (Sky City: New Science Fiction Stories by Danish Authors, Carl-Eddy Skovgaard ed., Science Fiction Cirklen)

“Stanlemian” by Wojciech Orliński, translated from the Polish by Danusia Stok (Lemistry, Comma Press)

The nominees were announced at Åcon 5, a joint Finnish-Swedish convention, over the weekend May 19-20. The announcement was read by Guest of Honor, Catherynne M. Valente.

The winning works will be announced at the 2012 Finncon on the weekend of July 21-22. Each winning author and translator will receive a cash prize of US$350. ARESFFT Board member Cheryl Morgan and jury member Irma Hirsjärvi will be present to make the announcement.

ARESFFT President Professor Gary K. Wolfe said: “I think this list proves that once you start looking for it, the diversity and quality of translated science fiction and fantasy are considerably greater than most of us had suspected, and I hope the nominations list calls attention to works too often overlooked by the usual awards processes.”

The money for the prize fund was obtained primarily through a 2011 fund-raising event for which prizes were kindly donated by George R.R. Martin, China Miéville, Cory Doctorow, Lauren Beukes, Ken MacLeod, Paul Cornell, Adam Roberts, Elizabeth Bear, Hal Duncan, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Peter F. Hamilton, Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, Nalo Hopkinson, Juliet E. McKenna, Aliette de Bodard, Nicola Griffith, Kelley Eskridge, Twelfth Planet Press, Deborah Kalin, Baen Books, Small Beer Press, Lethe Press, Aeon Press, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Kari Sperring, Helen Lowe, Rob Latham and Cheryl Morgan.

The jury for the awards was Dale Knickerbocker (Chair); Kari Maund, Abhijit Gupta, Hiroko Chiba, Stefan Ekman, Ekaterina Sedia, Felice Beneduce & Irma Hirsjärvi.

Nominations

Do you know of a work you would like the jury to consider? If so, please suggest it in comments below. Works should be first

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