Jedediah Berry has been named the winner of this year’s William L. Crawford Award for his first novel The Manual of Detection.
The award, presented annually at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, is designated for a new fantasy writer whose first book appeared the previous year. This year’s conference will be March 17-21 in Orlando, FL.
The nominators for this year’s award also shortlisted Deborah Biancotti’s story collection A Book of Endings, Kari Sperring’s novel Living with Ghosts, and Ali Shaw’s novel The Girl With Glass Feet, and wanted to commend two other authors whose works were ineligible this year but were highly regarded: Robert V.S. Redick, whose The Red Wolf Conspiracy appeared in 2008 and whose The Ruling Sea appears in 2010, and Michal Ajvaz, whose The Other City originally appeared in Czech in 1993 but was first translated into English, by Gerald Turner, in 2009.
Those participating, in varying degrees, in this year’s nomination and selection process included Kelly Link, Niall Harrison, Cheryl Morgan, Graham Sleight, Paul Witcover, John Clute, Jonathan Strahan, Liza Trombi, Farah Mendlesohn, and Amelia Beamer.