It’s July (but you knew that) here at EATING AUTHORS, and that means something special. It’s the month where we focus on those authors who have been nominated for the coveted John W. Campbell (not a Hugo) Award for Best New Writer that will be handed out at the World Science Fiction Convention in San Antonio, TX this year. Authors only have a narrow, two-year eligibility window for this prize, and for many that period comes and goes without them even noticing they had a shot. For this reason, and because I had the great fortune to have been nominated myself for this thing back in the day, I’m happy to do my part to increase the signal about the award.
Of the five nominees this year, four are in their second year of eligibility and two were actually nominated last year (Mur Lafferty and Stina Leicht). These two fine authors have already done a stint here at EATING AUTHORS, so they won’t get a repeat — I choose to take them at their respective words from last year as to their most memorable meal — but do take a moment to click on their names, (re)read their gustatory recollections, and familiarize yourself with their work. The point of this month’s posts is to introduce you to some new talent that you might not know about, and motivate you to vote (if you’re in a position to do so) for this award.
That said, over the next three Mondays we’ll hear from the remaining nominees. We begin this week with Zen Cho, who describes herself as a Malaysian author living in London. Her short story “First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia” was a finalist in the Selangor Young Talent Awards in 2011, and has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Like many Campbell nominees, she’s made it to the ballot on the strength of her short fiction, but she recently completed a novel and I’m sure we’ll see more in the future. In the meantime, check out “The Terracotta Bride” in the Torquere Press anthology, Steam Powered 2: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories, edited by JoSelle Vanderhooft, as well as “The Four Generations of Chang E” in Aliens: Recent Encounters, edited by Alex Dally MacFarlane and released last month from Prime Books.
