[January 12th] The World Fantasy Award: Y U NO World Enough?

I'm not much of an award person. I seem to miss all the major awards. I grow confused about eligibility and all of the dates. With my limited, often retrospective reading I don't think I can stay tuned to how fast new books pop up on award radars. Perhaps that is a fault of mine, but nevertheless, I 'm interested in The World Fantasy Award and Lavie Tidhar's call to internationalize the recommendations list.

Here a small excerpt from his post at The World SF blog: 

The judges for the WFA have to wade through an enormous amount of material. That that material is exclusively in the English language comes as no surprise, but still. I would like to see 2012 being truly representative of the best that international fantasy has to offer.

I would also like to see the Special Award (Professional and Non-Professional categories) being representative of the international scene.

We can help make this happen.

So here’s your mission – should you choose to accept it!

Tell us, in the comments, who you would like to see shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. Best Novel? Best Short Story? Special Award?

We’ll put together your recommendations into a list and post it. And let’s all hope for a year where the World Fantasy Award reflects that first word in its title.

You can read the rest of the post [HERE]. I'm behind the idea, though I'm not sure how successful it will be from the get go, because the domination of the English language hasn't happened without a reason. Excluding the USA, there exist an amount of countries with English as an official language and English is appointed as an international business language as well. Turning the tide towards including works in other languages [some less than popular such as Bulgarian] will bring in its own set of difficulties, unless they have been translated. 

As it is, I don't think the award can achieve the true potential of its name, unless it promotes world literature and that means somehow having the financial means and the time to translate fiction and then promote it. But then the award will turn into a publishing house, which as an idea is ridiculous.    

[November 15th] World SF / The Portal Merger

Something in tone with the news

Yesterday, it has been finally announced that The World SF Blog (run by Lavie Tidhar) has merged with Val Grimm's The Portal. This is an exciting merge, one which I believe is a perfect fit as both venues are complementary of each other.

The Portal provides excellent, high quality reviews of short fiction [I had to follow quite a lot of rules and guidelines, which made me more critical about my reviews] with an international angle, while The World SF Blog has its fingers on the pulse of international SFF with a lot of fun authors [my christening has to do with horror duo S.L.Grey, which really tops my 2011 experiences].

As a contributor to both venues, I'm more than excited to see the full effect of the changes take place and focus my own efforts in one place entirely.  

Here is the official press release post: World SF Blog to merge with The Portal; Expand Operations. And as soon as the new fiction editor Debbie Moorhouse has been announced, there is a new story on The World SF blog by Milena Benini from Croatia titled "Dancing Together Under Polarized Skies".

This reminds me. Are you interested in international fiction?