The Speculative Literature Foundation (SLF) has announced that Alaya Dawn Johnson is the recipient of their 2008 Gulliver Travel Research Grant. The $800 grant will be used for her travel to Mexico to research a novel.
“Alaya’s fiction is lean and muscular but bejeweled with strangeness,” said Colin Harvey, the SLF’s UK travel grant juror. “Within that strangeness, though, beat human hearts. Her characters love and grieve, are bitter, generous or ashamed—as real people are. Her proposal was detailed, her fiction compelling. She is a worthy winner, and we look forward to reading the completed novel.”
SLF Managing Director Corie Ralston added, “Alaya’s sample was a compelling slice of a brutal and beautifully realized world. The characters are fierce, tragic, and brave, and events in this tantalizingly short piece hint at the complexity to come: one gets the sense that the threads of art, love, and abmition will weave togther into a deeply passionate novel about human existence.”
Johnson’s first novel, Racing the Dark, was a mystical, magical coming-of-age story set on a Polynesian-like island. Agate Bolden released it in 2007, and a sequel is due out in 2009. Johnsons has also had shorter work published in Fantasy, Interzone, and David Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer’s Year’s Best sf and fantasy volumes.
The SLF also listed three honorable mentions: Rachel Cantor, David Hill, and Weston Ochse, and noted “they are all commended for fine eforts, and for making the decision to pick the eventual winner such a difficult one.”
The Gulliver Travel Research Grant is awarded to assist a writer of speculative fiction in his or her research. As in previous years, the 2008 grant of $800 is to be used to cover airfare, lodging, and/or other expenses relating to the research for a project of speculative fiction. The grant is awarded by a committee of Speculative Literature Foundation members on the basis of interest and merit. The grant is named after Gulliver, a character in the 1726 story “Gulliver’s Travels” written by Jonathan Swift. The story represents one of the earliest examples of fantasy travel.