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The Aeon Award 2008
Welcome! Below you will find the full set of rules and guidelines for entering your story in the International Aeon Award 2008 contest for short fiction in any speculative genre, i.e. fantasy, SF, horror or anything in between or unclassifiable! The Award has a grand prize of €1000 and publication in Albedo One! Second and third place prizes are 200 and 100 euro (kindly sponsored by Yellow Brick Road) and guaranteed publication in Albedo One. You'll also find below a PayPal payment button which you can use to securely and easily pay the entry fee of €7, which we have kept as low as is feasible. PayPal is fast and safe, and you do NOT need to have a PayPal account to choose this payment option! PayPal accepts all major credit cards and debit cards. Try it, it's easier than you think!
Any queries may be addressed to fraslaw@yahoo.co.uk
Thanks for your interest in the Award, and the very best of luck!!!
Albedo One
Ireland's Magazine of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror,
is proud to announce
the 3rd Aeon Award for short fiction:
The Aeon Award 2008
Grand Prize: €1000
Second Prize: €200
Third Prize: €100 (sponsored by Yellow Brick Road)
Plus guaranteed publication in Albedo One for the top three stories as judged by renowned SF author Ian Watson.
Times & Dates
The contest opens 1st January 2008, and runs for four rounds throughout the year. The submission deadline for the first round is March 31st, the second round June 30th, the third round September 30th and the final round November 30th. The final round is of two months duration, the rest of three months. Each round begins immediately after the end of the previous round (i.e. you may submit at any time from 1st Jan to 30th Nov).
At the end of each round, the best story submissions received within each round will be chosen by a panel of judges and shortlisted for the Award. The stories chosen for short listing in each round will be announced here on the Albedo One website (www.albedo1.com) shortly after the end of each round, as the contest proceeds. The shortlsit and final results will also be printed in Albedo One magazine for all the world to see.
At the end of the contest, shortly after Nov 30th 2008, the judges will choose the six highest-ranking stories from the shortlist. The top three winning stories will be chosen from these six stories by renowned science fiction, fantasy and horror author Ian Watson (www.ianwatson.info). The decisions of the judging panel, and thereafter of grand judge Ian Watson, are final. No correspondence will be entered into in this regard.
Submission Format & Addresses
Entries should be no more than 8,000 words (but there is no minimum word length) and must be typed, double spaced on one side of A4 (or equivalent) paper, and submitted by post to:
Aeon Award
8 Bachelor's Walk
Dublin 1
Republic of Ireland
Alternatively, entrants may submit their work by e-mail to fraslaw@yahoo.co.uk Submissions must be pasted within the body of the email, attachments can not be opened for security reasons. Submissions must also clearly have the words “Aeon Award Submission” in their subject lines to prevent mislabeling as spam.
Receipt of email submissions will be acknowledged. If you have not received an acknowledgement one week after submitting by email, please send a query to THIS email address.
Multiple entries are allowed throughout the period of the contest. Submissions are judged anonymously by our judges. You may submit any number of stories, and have any number of stories on the shortlist. No prejudice is held against authors with more than one submission, or with more than one shortlisted story.
Entries are allowed from ALL nationalities. Indeed, the judges are keen to see work from as many countries as possible. However, entries must be in the English language.
Story Rights & Conditions
Entries to the Award must NOT have been previously published in ANY format in the English language. Entries found to have been previously published in English will be disqualified from the contest.
Stories submitted to the Award in each round must NOT be submitted or published elsewhere in any format until those stories that have been chosen for the shortlist are announced on the Albedo One website after each round. If your story has not been chosen for the shortlist after the round in which it was entered, you are free to submit elsewhere.
Stories that are chosen for the shortlist after each round must NOT be submitted or published elsewhere until the top six stories from the shortlist have been chosen and announced on the Albedo One website. Shortlisted stories found to have been submitted or published elsewhere before the announcement of the top six shortlisted stories will be disqualified from consideration.
Once the top six stories are announced, all other stories on the shortlist may be submitted or published elsewhere (i.e. all rights revert to the authors). Of the top six stories, Albedo One retains the right to publish those stories. Authors will be informed of whether their story will be published in Albedo One within a maximum of two months from the announcement of the top six stories.
Of the top three stories (which are guaranteed publication in Albedo One), these must NOT be published elsewhere until after their publication in Albedo One (i.e. rights revert to the authors upon publication - for those concerned, Albedo One and the Aeon Award never claim permanent rights to your story).
Payment Details & Options
All stories entered to the Award must be accompanied by an entry fee of €7 (euro).
Payment may be made securely and easily via the PayPal button below this section. Note, you do NOT need a PayPal account to use this option. PayPal accepts payment from all major credit and debit cards and is internationally recognised as a fast, easy and secure way to make online payments (see www.paypal.com).
You may use PayPal to pay for entries submitted by post or email. For entries paid by PayPal, please provide your unique 12 digit transaction id code (which will look something like 3343-7694-0917-1303) with your cover letter (be it for postal or email submissions). This code is provided to you by PayPal as you complete the payment process and allows us to verify that you have indeed paid the entry fee (which we have kept as low as is feasible, to ensure the contest is accessible to as many people as possible).
Alternatively, for further alternative payment options (e.g. cheque) please contact bobn@yellowbrickroad.ie
The €7 entry fee may also be paid in cash enclosed in the envelope with your submission.
Please be aware that we will check to see that the entry fee has been paid by one of the above means prior to reading your submission. The Award is intended to be open to as many people as possible, so if you have any queries or difficulties, please don't hesitate to contact fraslaw@yahoo.co.uk
PAYPAL PAYMENT OPTION:
The Aeon Award 2006 - 2007
The winner of the Aeon Award 2006-2007 was announced at the European Science Fiction Convention in Copenhagen, Denmark, September 2007 (see website here). Grand Judge Ian Watson chose as winner from the top six shortlisted stories, Nina Allan's "Angelus", commenting that the story
was “beautifully written and paced and enigmatic yet in an entirely lucid way”. Congratulations to Nina, who received the €1000 prize money, and whose story will be published in Albedo One!
Below is a snippet of a few words of Nina's from the announcement ceremony in Copenhagen:
It is a truly great honour to have been named as the winner of this year's Aeon Award. I would like to thank the Albedo One team for thinking up the competition in the first place, for organizing it with such energy and enthusiasm, and for showing such a heartfelt commitment to speculative fiction. It is precisely magazines like Albedo One that have always helped to foster upcoming talent and thus ensure the growth and continuation of the genre. Where on earth would we be without them? I would like to thank the readers and judges, with especial thanks of course to Ian Watson for giving of his time and for paying me such a marvellous compliment. Finally I would like to thank the fans and the readers and the other writers - in short, the people at this convention. SF is and always has been at the very forefront of everything that is radical, exciting, and liberating in contemporary fiction - and as SF readers and writers no-one knows this better than you. Thank you for your sense of wonder.
The stories falling second and third place will also appear in Albedo One, issue 34, due out early 2008. These were "Isle of Beauty" by Larry Taylor and "The White Knight" by Devon Code.
The full shortlist is below:
Top Six Shortlisted Stories (in no order):
Isle of Beauty – Larry Taylor
Angelus – Nina Allan
Partial Recall – Sean Day
The Dreamy Sloth – Jennifer Glyn
The White Knight – Devon Code
A Giant in the House – Daniel Pearlman
The Shortlist (in no order):
Dress Rehearsal – Michael Furlong
Ezekiel, Prophet to Bones - Eric M. Witchey
The Waters and the West – Jennifer Harwood-Smith
Forbidden Fruit - Marie-Catherine Mousseau
One In One Out – Jennifer Glyn
High Rise – Joanna Owen
Holes – Eric S. Smith
Saviours – Jennifer Harwood-Smith
The Torturess – Philip Lentz
Rourke – Andrew McKenna
To the End of the Earth – Geoff Nuttall
Faithless – Jaine Fenn
Lux Lucis – Rosie Reynolds
Beware of Falling Rocks – Christine Stanton
The Patron – Michael Simon
Stowaway – David Sakmyster
Shadows of Inspiration – Eric S. Smith
The sleepers – Alastair Duncan
Black Water – David Conyers
Aeon Award 2006-2007 Entrants by Country as Proportion of Total Entrants
The Inaugural Aeon Award, 2004-2005
A report by Frank Ludlow (taken from Albedo One, issue 31)
The Aeon Award is all about promoting authors in the fantastic genres who write stories which defy easy classification. This is what gives it relevance amidst the many SF, Fantasy and Horror story awards that seem to encourage writing for - and within - particular pigeon holes.
Of course, this relevance remains pure theory unless the submitted stories succeed in escaping easy labeling and have something substantial to offer the reader. In this issue of Albedo One you will have found the top six shortlisted stories, so you too can be their judge. I hope you were as delighted as our grand judge Ian Watson and the reading panel were. I feel these stories have proven that the high goals which the Aeon Award set itself were met. Thanks to the authors!
Aeon Award winner Julian West (l) and judge Ian Watson (r).
Photo (c) Roelof Goudriaan
The Award Winner was Irish author Julian West, for his story 'My Marriage' [which received an Honourable Mention in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, 2007]. I should explain here that the stories read by Ian Watson did not have the author's name attached, so nationality played no part in selecting the winner. In fact, the top six shortlisted stories came from authors in four different countries.
Ian had this to say about the winning story: "One of the many first-rate stories in this shortlist, I chose as winner 'My Marriage' because I found it rather unsettling and I wouldn't be surprised if it is subsequently short-listed for the Lambda Award, the award for stuff that pushes gender boundaries."
The Award was presented at a crowded ceremony in the Hilton Hotel, hosted during the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, August 2005. Aeon short-listed authors Dev Agarwal and David Levine were also present at the ceremony, in the company of as many people as the hall would hold. The Award presentation followed an equally crowded launch of the latest book from Aeon Press, Emerald Eye, with a word of welcome from Anne McCaffrey and readings by John Kenny and John W. Sexton.
The authors are the people who make a story award a success, and our deepest thanks go out to the hundreds of authors who submitted their stories. Our thanks are also due to all those people who helped promote the Award via their sites, blogs, forums or newsletters.
Below are, in alphabetical order, the short and long-listed authors.
The Top Six Shortlisted Stories:
Queen of Engines by Dev Agarwal
Letting Out The Angels by Andrew McKenna
I Hold My Father's Paws by David Levine
Like Snow by Brian Richmond
Expiating Ancestral Sins by Tais Teng
My Marriage by Julian West
Remaining Shortlist:
Sooterkin by Corina Bechko
Dirk Snigby's Guide to the Afterlife by Elizabeth Eve
Black Hole Baby by Peter Loftus
Juju by Lee Moan
First published in Albedo One issue 31
Please note that Albedo One may occasionally (i.e. no more than 4 times per year) get in contact to let you know about new issues, changes to our guidelines and other announcements. Don't worry, we're not talking about spam here, and we will NEVER provide your contact details to other organisations. If you're not interested in hearing the occasional announcement, please just let us know and well only respond to your initial query or submission. Thank you for your interest and support.
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