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Other Genre Awards

Naomi_uk72

Posted 2020-08-02 9:28 AM (#22297)
Subject: Other Genre Awards

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Posts: 116
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Location: Sheffield, UK

With WorldCon being held in New Zealand this year, and the way the local SFF awards were basically tacked on the end of the retro-hugos as an afterthought, I've been thinking about other genre-related awards around the world and was wondering if it might be worth adding them to the database on here. For example:

New Zealand : The Sir Julius Vogel Awards have been going since 2002, and seem to fill a similar role in NZ as the Aurealis in Australia.
http://www.sffanz.org.nz/sjv/sjvAwards.shtml

China : The Galaxy Awards have been going since '86 and carry as much weight in China as the Nebula Awards do in the USA. And Chinese SFF seems to have gained a lot of interest in the West in the last five years or so, what with Cixin Liu, Xia Jia, Bao Shu and many others getting their works translated into English recently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Award_(China)

Japan : The Seiun Awards have been around even longer, having started back in 1970 and have as much weight there as the Hugos do elsewhere. This makes them older than a lot of the awards listed on here, and again there are a lot of Japanese SFF authors getting translated into English (and other languages) for Western audiences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiun_Award

Also Japan : The Sense of Gender Awards seem to fill a similar gap in Japan as the James Tiptree Jr/Otherwise awards do in the Anglophone world, and have been around since 2001. Previous winners include N.K. Jemisin and Eileen Gunn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_of_Gender_Awards

That's just the few I know of off the top of my head. I know this site is effectively run by volunteers, so I know adding a bunch of additional awards to the database would not be an easy task, but I think it would help expand the reading lists of a lot of users if they had easy acces to lists of critically acclaimed genre works outside the usual western-tinged (typically American and British) lists that normally get bandied around the interwebs.

What do you all think?

Edited by Naomi_uk72 2020-08-02 9:29 AM

Administrator

Posted 2020-08-02 6:06 PM (#22298 - in reply to #22297)
Subject: RE: Other Genre Awards

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Posts: 4003
2000

Location: Dallas, Texas

We're all about more awards AND lists! Here is what is on our current awards list that we are working towards:

Ditmar

Sidewise

Sunburst

Theodore Sturgeon Memorial

Crawford

Nommo

Neukom Institute Literary Award

Julius Vogel

Lodestar

Astounding

Add to those the many short fiction categories for the awards we have now like novella, novelette, short story, anthology, collection etc. and you can see we have our work cut out for us.

Country specific awards are very important to us but we are not equipped for adding non-english awards to the site at this time. From your list we already have the Vogel in our plan and I will point out the Nommo (African SF), Ditmar (Australian), and Sunburst (Canadian) so we have those coming too.

We are also working on a really extensive list of foreign language works in translation that hopefully will fulfill part of your desire. That one has turned into a much bigger project that we anticipated but it will be a great resource for folks who what to read what's coming out in the non-english world.

Naomi_uk72

Posted 2020-08-02 6:25 PM (#22299 - in reply to #22297)
Subject: Re: Other Genre Awards

Veteran

Posts: 116
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Location: Sheffield, UK

Excellent news, thank you. I remembered about the Ditmar and Nommo after I'd sent my OP, so it's good to see those on your pending list. :-)

Thanks the reply, and all the best with the ongoing work.

TonkaToys

Posted 2020-08-06 2:51 AM (#22340 - in reply to #22297)
Subject: Re: Other Genre Awards

Member

Posts: 25

Location: Hitchin, UK

This is good news! Thanks to all involved.