The winners of this year’s Sunburst Awards for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic have just been announced.
The winner of the 2011 adult award is Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay (Penguin Group Canada) and the winner of its 2011 young adult award is Bookweirder by Paul Glennon (Doubleday Canada).
The awards were presented last night during an Authors at Harbourfront Centre event [see this article] following readings from each of the short-listed works. For more information and to view photos of the ceremony, see this page.
About Under Heaven, the Sunburst jury said: “This is a beautifully-written, fascinating, epic alternate history with engaging, believable characters; evocative, moody, lyrical, emotionally touching, with cleverly elaborate plotting.”
About Bookweirder, the Sunburst Jury said: “This story evokes what the first few years of real reading were like—tumbling into story after story and losing track of the boundary between oneself and the books for a while. A must for any book-lover of any age.”
The jurors for the 2011 award were Kate Freiman, Mark Leslie, Christopher Roden, and Alison Sinclair.
The Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic is “a prized and juried award presented annually. It is based on excellence of writing and awarded to a Canadian writer who has published a speculative fiction novel or book-length collection any time during the previous calendar year. Named after the novel by Phyllis Gotlieb (1926-2009), one of the first published authors of contemporary Canadian speculative fiction, the award consists of a cash prize of $1,000 and a hand-crafted medallion which incorporates a ‘Sunburst’ logo, designed by Marcel Gagné.”
We detailed the nominees in this article.