Tag Archives: Hervé Le Tellier

Arthur C. Clarke Award 2023 Shortlist

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The shortlist for the 2023 Arthur C. Clarke Award science fiction book of the year was released on June 7.

The six titles are:

  • Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman (Sceptre) 
  • The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard (Gollancz) 
  • Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick (Gollancz) 
  • The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier, translated by Adriana Hunter (Michael Joseph) 
  • The Coral Bones by E. J. Swift (Unsung Stories) 
  • Metronome by Tom Watson (Bloomsbury) 

Chair of Judges, Dr Andrew M. Butler, said: “This year we’ve shortlisted authors that have never made the Clarke Award’s top six before. It’s always good to see new authors or authors new to science fiction standing out from so many submissions. I look forward to what I suspect will be a passionately argued decision.”

This year’s winner will be announced on August 16.
 
The winner will receive a trophy in the form of a commemorative engraved bookend and prize money to the value of £2023.00; a tradition that sees the annual prize money rise incrementally by year from the year 2001 in memory of Sir Arthur C. Clarke.
 
The judging panel for the Arthur C. Clarke Award 2023 were: Dave Hutchinson and Francis Gene-Rowe for the British Science Fiction Association; Kate Heffner and Nicholas Whyte for the Science Fiction Foundation; and Georgie Knight for the SCI-FI-LONDON film festival. Dr Andrew M. Butler represented the Arthur C. Clarke Award directors in a non-voting role as the Chair of the Judges.

[Based on a press release.]

2020 Prix Goncourt

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The winner of the 2020 Prix Goncourt, the French equivalent to the Booker Prize or National Book Award, has been announced and it’s a genre novel. The novel in question is L’Anomalie (The Anomaly) by Hervé Le Tellier.

France 24’s article “Futuristic thriller wins top French literary award” synopsizes the plot:

… Tellier had been tipped for glory with a page-turner of a novel in which a hit man, a Nigerian pop star and a writer land in New York only to find that their flight — and other versions of their selves — had already arrived three months earlier.

The award is not a lucrative one, but it should pay off in future sales:

… While Tellier gets a paltry 10 euros ($12) in prize money, the award invariably catapults the winner to the top of the best-seller lists.

Deutsche Welle, in “Goncourt Prize goes to ‘Anomaly’ of a novel”

The book has been described as a “literary UFO” combining different genres, from science-fiction to crime novel, from comedy to romance. It’s “a popular adventure, a real page-turner, an imminent bestseller, but also an experimental, ultra-literary work,” wrote author Frédéric Beigbeder in a review for Le Figaro magazine.

The Prix Goncourt is awarded by the jury of the Academie Goncourt.

[Thanks to Cora Buhlert for the story.]