University announces annual science fiction awards


LAWRENCE — The winners of this year's John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best science fiction novel and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best short science fiction have been announced by Christopher McKitterick, director of the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. The awards will be given out during the Campbell Conference Awards banquet Friday, June 13, as part of the Campbell Conference, held annually at KU.

Sarah Pinsker will be presented the Sturgeon Award for her short story “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss” from the July 2013 issue of Strange Horizons.

Marcel Theroux will be presented the Campbell Award for his novel "Strange Bodies," published by Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

The 2014 Campbell Conference runs through Sunday, June 15. On Saturday, June 14, an open-to-the-public booksigning featuring all the authors attending the conference will take place at Jayhawk Ink bookstore in the Kansas Union. A complete schedule of events and the attending authors can be found here.

The Sturgeon Award was established in 1987 by James Gunn, founding director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at KU, and the heirs of Theodore Sturgeon, including his partner, Jayne Engelhart Tannehill, and Sturgeon's children, as an appropriate memorial to one of the great short-story writers in a field distinguished by its short fiction.

Writers and critics Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss established the Campbell Award to honor the late editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine (which later became Analog) as a way of continuing his efforts to encourage writers to produce their best work. Campbell, who edited the magazine from 1937 until his death in 1971, is called by many writers and scholars the father of modern science fiction. 

Thu, 06/12/2014

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Lydia Ash

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Lydia Ash

Department of English

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