I am very pleased and honoured to be shortlisted for this year’s BSFA Non-fiction Award, for my paper on gender related issues and barriers in SF&F writing careers “The Myth of Meritocracy and the Reality of the Leaky Pipe and Other Obstacles in Science Fiction & Fantasy”.

You can find the full shortlists here, for Best Novel, Best Short Fiction, Best Non-fiction and Best Artwork. As you will see, I am shortlisted alongside an array of very fine writers in all these categories, and make sure to check out these talented artists’ work too.

Yes, of course I’d like to win, but it really isn’t just a platitude to say that it’s genuinely an honour to be nominated 🙂

What else have I been doing lately, since I’m self-evidently not doing much blogging? Well, we’ve been getting The Green Man’s Heir ready for publication, and that’ll be happening soon. I’m also busy with a couple of other projects that are still in the sufficiently early stages that it’s not really the right time to be talking about them. Apologies for vagueblogging there.

I’m also doing an inordinate quantity of reading for the World Fantasy Awards, and that’s pretty much the thing that’s stopping me blogging most of all, and not just for lack of time. There are all sorts of posts I could write, exploring ideas sparked by all this reading, but that would be pretty much impossible to do without people identifying the books I was referencing, however obliquely. It would be horribly unfair to raise Author A’s hopes – because many excellent books will not win – as it would be to leave Author B wondering ‘why no mention of my lovely book?’ – because their novel is still on the ‘Pending’ pile, or I simply haven’t chosen it to illustrate a particular point.

I can certainly say I am reading some excellent books, novellas and short stories, and getting an unparalleled overview of the range and strength in depth of speculative fiction at the moment.