International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

The winner of the 2008 Crawford Fantasy Award is Christopher Barzak, for his first novel One for Sorrow (Bantam). The award, sponsored by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, recognizes an outstanding first book of fantasy published during the preceding year, and will be presented March 22 at the association’s annual conference in Orlando, Florida.

In a departure from past years, the Association has simultaneously released the winner along with the shortlist for the award. Other titles on this year’s shortlist are Laird Barron, The Imago Sequence (Night Shade); Ron Currie, Jr., God is Dead (Viking); Ellen Klages, Portable Childhoods (Tachyon); and Ysabeau Wilce, Flora Segunda (Harcourt). Ekaterina Sedia’s The Secret History of Moscow, praised by a number of the award nominators, was ineligible for the shortlist because of an earlier fantasy novel published by Sedia in 2005.

Instead of a formal committee structure, the Crawford Award is determined by a panel of nominators, who review and discuss each other’s nominations. This year’s panel included John Clute, Kelly Link, Farah Mendlesohn, Cheryl Morgan, and Graham Sleight. The award is administered by Gary K. Wolfe of the IAFA Board.

The Crawford Award was established in 1985 through a grant from Andre Norton in memory of early fantasy small-press publisher William L. Crawford, who had died the preceding year. Past winners have included Charles de Lint, Susan Palwick, Greer Gilman, Jonathan Lethem, Candas Jane Dorsey, Alexander Irvine, Steph Swainston, and Joe Hill. Last year’s winner was M. Rickert.

IAFA GRADUATE STUDENT AWARD
The 29th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts

The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts is pleased to continue its annual award and stipend to the graduate student submitting the most outstanding paper at the Association’s 2008 Conference, to be held at the Orlando Marriott Airport Hotel, Orlando, FL, March 19-23, 2008. The award, and a cheque for $250, will be presented to the winner at the Awards Banquet on Saturday evening.

CRITERIA & INSTRUCTIONS

1. The student will have had a paper accepted for presentation at the
Conference. The paper submitted for the competition should be essentially the same as that presented at the conference. The maximum length for entries is 3500 words (about 2 pages over the recommended reading length of 8-9 pages), excluding bibliography/works cited page. Students should be aware that funds are limited and that only one award will be given. The paper selected will be published in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and therefore must not have been previously published or submitted for publication elsewhere. Please note that acceptance of a paper for the Conference does not guarantee an award.

2. It is the responsibility of the student to send a copy of the paper by 1 February 2008 to the IAFA Student-Support Committee’s Chair, as well as a copy of the letter of acceptance and verification of student status.

Submissions should be in MSWord or rich text format (rtf) files, sent as e-mail attachments to Robin Anne Reid, Student Support Committee Chair, at:

Robin_Reid@tamu-commerce.edu
rrede13@yahoo.com

Students may be in master’s or doctoral programs, at any stage of their program (taking courses, taking exams, writing theses or dissertations), as long as they are currently enrolled. Verification of student status could be a letter of confirmation from a director or advisor, a copy of student ID, etc.

Support documents may be sent as attached files to the same address or sent by mail to:
Department of Literature and Languages
Texas A&M University-Commerce
Commerce, TX 75429

3. The committee is looking for good writing: clear, coherent, and
interesting. Essays should be solidly grounded in scholarly tradition, showing awareness of previous studies and of historical contexts. Essays may use any suitable method of analysis, including historical and sociological approaches as well as those which originate in literary theory. Judges tend to value the ability to examine materials from a theoretical perspective without simply plugging in a particular critical method. Essays should give a clear idea of the critical/theoretical framework within which the discussion will be situated, as well as identify primary and secondary texts for the discussion.