The 2010 Arthur C. Clarke Award—including the £2010 prize—will be handed out on 28 April as part of the Sci-Fi-London Film Festival.
The short-listed books for this year’s award are:
Spirit by Gwyneth Jones (Gollancz)
The City & The City by China Miéville (Macmillan)
Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)
Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson (HarperCollins)
Far North by Marcel Theroux (Faber & Faber)
Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding (Gollancz)
The annual award is “presented for the best science fiction novel of the year, and selected from a shortlist of novels whose UK first edition was published in the previous calendar year.” It was originally established by a grant from Sir Arthur C. Clarke with the aim of promoting science fiction in Britain.
The winner is judged by a jury panel and selected from the shortlist of six eligible novels. The panel of judges is made up of a voluntary body of distinguished writers, critics, and fans with the panel line-up changing every year. This year’s judging panel includes Chris Hill and Jon Courtenay Grimwood of the British Science Fiction Association, Francis Spufford and Rhiannon Lassiter of the Science Fiction Foundation, and Paul Skevington of SFCrowsnest.com. Paul Billinger represents the Arthur C. Clarke Award as the Chair of Judges.
Award Administrator Tom Hunter said: “Given the strength of this year’s submissions this was clearly a difficult selection to make. I think this is a truly exciting shortlist, I’m greatly looking forward to seeing how the conversation develops and I’d like to thank the judges for all their hard work in the past year.
“I’d also like to thank our supporting organisations for supplying our judges this year, as well as Sci-Fi-London for hosting us again and SFX for being media partners for the 2010 awards.
“The Clarke Award depends on volunteers to run it, partner organisations to support it, and readers and fans to keep us relevant, recommendable and, above all, readable.”