Reminder: BFS Awards 2007 - voting deadline looming

Just a quick memo to fellow members of the British Fantasy Society to remind you all that the deadline for voting in this year's BFS Awards is next Wednesday, August 1st, so get your postal ballots sorted out over the weekend or complete the online form, if you haven't done so already. I sent mine in this week (he says, virtuously) and I'm looking forward to the annual round of cheering and friendly barracking that is the awards dinner at Fantasycon, where I think Pete Crowther might be roping me into hosting a table on behalf of PS Publishing (cough Best Small Press Category cough), or something...

July 27, 2007 | Filed Under Books | 6 Comments

Last call for BFS 2007 nominations

The British Fantasy Society If you're a British Fantasy Society member, you have until the end of the day to send in your nominations for this year's British Fantasy Awards for work published or produced during 2006. The voting will then open sometime in the next couple of months and the winners will be announced at this year's Fantasycon in September.

There are two new categories this year: 'Best non-fiction' (I'll go out on a limb and predict that Cinema Macabre is a good prospect for that one) and the rather nebulous-sounding 'Best Newcomer' (for a specific title first published in 2006? A specific project or venture first launched in 2006? A writer first published, anywhere, in 2006?); for which recommendations are sought, but which will be decided by a panel of judges.

Slightly annoyingly, the BFS still haven't addressed the issue of the 'Best Small Press' category, which I've been muttering about for years. In recent years the shortlist has included a number of small presses (as you'd most likely understand the term to apply: independent amateur and / or semi-pro publishers, in other words) as well as small press publications (one year both PS Publishing and its magazine publication Postscripts were both short-listed, which most probably split the vote) and even websites; our own UKSFBN-precursor site, The Alien Online, was short-listed a couple of times in recent years. Which was very gratifying, of course, but also extremely wrong, as none of us (myself, Sandy Auden and our fellow contributors) would ever have considered ourselves to be a 'small press' per se.

Hence my minor agitation towards re-naming the category something like 'Best Independent Press or Publication', which I think could conceivably cover a multitude of sins and also be a lot more comprehensible to the BFS voters. I suggested it when I was on the committee a few years back, then brought it up at a couple of AGMs, but was told I had to send some sort of official letter of request to the committee. Never quite got round to doing that (so I suppose I can't have been that bothered, really...) but partly also because I didn't want it to sound like sour grapes on my part.

The committee has, however, finally combined the 'Best Anthology' and 'Best Collection' awards (presumably to free up enough in the kitty for the new, 'Best non-fiction' statuette) so fair play to them. Hey, I wonder if websites could be nominated for that new 'Best non-fiction' category? Hmmm. It doesn't specifically say so on the voting info page. Too late, anyhow. I sent in my recommendations a week ago.

And now, all you BFS members should do the same.