Michael Bishop posted full information about this year’s Jamie Bishop Memorial Award on Facebook. The name of the winner was previously announced at the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts 2021 online award ceremony on March 21.

Each year the winner of the Jamie Bishop Memorial Award is announced at the annual conference, given “to the author or authors of a critical essay on the fantastic written in a language other than English.”

Michael Bishop wrote:

It’s presented in Jamie’s memory because he was a speaker and a teacher of German, as well as an artist who created digital artwork for SF and fantasy titles.

[April 16 is] the 14th anniversary of the events at Virginia Tech that took his life along with those of 27 students and four other teachers. So word of this year’s Award came at a sensitive but entirely appropriate time

University of Florida Associate Professor of English Terry Harpold says there were submissions in nine languages. Eighteen judges from Europe, Canada, and the US reviewed the candidates, and three finalists and one overall winner of the Award were chosen.

The three finalists this year were Marcellin Block for a paper in French, Tessa Sermet for another essay in French, and Yu Xuying in Chinese on the work of Liu Cixin.

The overall winner, Maria Belliaeva Solomon, an associate professor at the University of Maryland, received the Award for an essay in French on Gerard de Nerval’s first work of prose fiction, the 1832 story “The Enchanted Hand,” which was published in the Revue Nerval.

Jamie Bishop (1971-2007) was the son of Michael Bishop, an award-winning science fiction writer, and Jeri Whitaker Bishop, an elementary-school counselor; he grew up in Pine Mountain, Georgia, the family’s hometown since 1974, and attended school there as well as in Athens, Georgia, and in both Kiel and Heidelberg, Germany. Jamie was an artist and a craftsman as well as an instructor of the German language at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). He was among those killed in the Virginia Tech massacre of April 16, 2007.

A list of past Bishop Award winners is at this link.