Ed Fortune

Back in March,  STARBURST Magazine announced it’s finalists  for the Brave New Words Award. They are:

Evan Winter – Rage of Dragons (Orbit Books)
Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar – This is How You Lose the Time War (Jo Fletcher Books)
Tyler Hayes – The Imaginary Corpse (Angry Robot)
Sady Doyle – Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers (MHP Books)
Nisi Shawl – New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color (Rebellion)
Tamsyn Muir – Gideon the Ninth (Tor)

This year’s Brave New Words list is very exciting

In case you don’t know the award, it’s pretty simple. It’s an award for words that are Brave and New. It covers a lot of space, can go to editors, writers, bloggers and the like.  It’s always exciting to managed.

I walked away from this year’s  Starburst International Film Festival in March after vigorous chat with the team, which is the final bit of the of the shortlist process.  We announced the finalists via the main website and in print.  The plan was to then get the judges to judge the books, and announce the winner at Edge Lit. (We’d selected judges in January.)

Covid-19 had other ideas, and Edge Lit got cancelled.  So we are taking our time with it all, and the results are likely to turn up an online convention in October/November 2020. Goodness knows how we are getting the award to people, that’s a job for a future Ed.

We are also planning to a new award, the Starburst Hero Award for Literary excellence. It does what it says on the tin, the designs are very exciting.

The panel of judges for the Brave New Words Award includes genre critics and media professionals. The panel includes Urban Fantasy author Russell Smith media expert Rebecca Derrick, book podcaster Jane Hanmer and book blogger Matt Cavanagh Finally, we welcome narrative expert Professor Esther MacCallum-Stewartto the team.  They are excellent people and I’m looking forward to announcing who the winner is.

(Thanks to the magic of editing old blogs, you can find out who won here. )