Geoff Ryman wins literary prize for fantastic fiction
07 Dec 2012
The 2012 Sunburst Award recognises his collection of stories 'Paradise Tales' as the best in Canadian fantastic literature.
Geoff Ryman, Senior Lecture in the Centre of New Writing, has won the 2012 Sunburst Award in the adult category for his Paradise Tales (Small Beer Press, ISBN - 9781931520645).
About Paradise Tales, the Sunburst jury said: "Paradise Tales is a terrific collection of stories covering a dizzying range of imaginative possibilities and narrators. A superb stylist, the author fully adjusts the tone and rhetoric of each story to its narrator and its context.
"This masterful and eclectic collection includes looks at a truly post-human future in which intelligent animals carry the seeds of a new humanity but may not want to produce it, as well as stories featuring various suggestive biotech possibilities, to the pioneering filmmakers of Mars, and to tender ghost stories, such as the fantasy dreams of the first lover of Pol Pot’s daughter.
"The author puts wit and consummate style at the service of profoundly human philosophical extrapolations."
The jurors for the 2012 award were Douglas Barbour, Zsuzsi Gartner, Daniel Justice, Lorna Toolis and Halli Villegas.
This is Geoff's second Sunburst Award. He also won in 2005 for his novel Air.
The Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic is an annual award celebrating the best in Canadian fantastic literature published during the previous calendar year.
The winners receive a cash prize of $1,000 as well as a medallion which incorporates the Sunburst logo.
The Sunburst Award takes its name from the debut novel of the late Phyllis Gotlieb, one of the first published authors of contemporary Canadian speculative fiction.
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