We’re pleased to announce the finalists for the second annual Last Drink Bird Head Awards, as chosen by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. The purpose of the awards is to celebrate those in the genre community who enrich us with their time, energy, and words, for causes greater than themselves. Finalists for this year’s award were chosen for efforts in 2009 and/or 2010. Thanks for recommendations from last year’s winners.About the Neil Clarke Special Achievement Award, Jeff tells us "The Special Achievement Award is geared toward recognizing individuals who are proactive behind the scenes but whose efforts often don’t receive the measure of public recognition they deserve. The winner will receive an elegant Hieronymous Bosch bird-with-letter figurine, a certificate, and chocolate. The award is named after the first year’s winner, publisher and editor Neil Clarke."
The winner of the Neil Clark Special Achievement Award, as announced below, is L. Timmel Duchamp. Please join us in congratulating her for her efforts.[...]The awards are named after the anthology Last Drink Bird Head from Ministry of Whimsy Press (an imprint of Wyrm Publishing). The proceeds from the anthology benefit the ProLiteracy charity. Contributors include Peter Straub, Ellen Kushner, Gene Wolfe, Tanith Lee, and over 60 others.
Go read more about it, including the interesting award categories and the nominees for them, here. This will be my first award since my graduate student years. I just love the idea of being given "an elegant Hieronymous Bosch bird-with-letter figure." (And isn't that interesting, about the chocolate...?)
What lovely news! Congratulations!
ReplyDeleteBut it is weird to see the conjunction of 'elegant' with 'Hieronymous Bosch'... not exactly the quality one associates with his work.
Thanks, Lesley. As for 'elegant'... I'm amused by that-- & will wait to see what it looks like before I venture an opinion on that conjunction...
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to see you getting such well-deserved recognition.
ReplyDeleteAnd I think in the VanderMeer World, elegant and Hieronymous Bosch do correlate. Though perhaps not in any other.
While I wouldn't call the Bosch "bird-with-letter" . . . well, I wouldn't have come up with the word "bird-with-letter," although it's descriptive enough that I knew what Bosch image it was referring to . . . "elegant," if the photo of it on the linked site is accurate, it is indeed an elegant figure, even if it doesn't depict the most elegant of critters.
ReplyDeleteI also like the idea that "elegant" can apply to the kind of SFnal rococo aesthetic that begins in Balzac and culminates in VanderMeer.