Category: News

The Carl Brandon Society is pleased to announce the winners of our 2006 and 2007 awards.

The winner of the 2006 Carl Brandon Parallax Award is Mindscape by Andrea Hairston. [Note: No work will receive the 2006 Carl Brandon Kindred Award.]

The 2007 Carl Brandon Parallax Award winner is The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor. The 2007 Carl Brandon Kindred Award winner is From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain by Minister Faust.

A presentation ceremony for the 2006 and 2007 awards will take place at Arisia, an annual science fiction convention held in Boston, Massachusetts. Award recipients Andrea Hairston and Nnedi Okorafor will be in attendance, and the honors lists for the 2006 and 2007 Parallax and Kindred Awards will be announced there.

Nominations for the 2008 Parallax and Kindred Awards are now closed. We will announce our winners later this year. Nominations for the 2009 Parallax and Kindred Awards will be accepted through June 1, 2010. Visit the awards page for more information.

Novelist Michael Holgate, from Jamaica, recently received a Moonbeam Award for his children’s fantasy novel Night of the Indigo. More from Krista Henry, Staff Reporter at the Jamaica Gleaner:

The Moonbeam Awards are some of the fastest growing United States-based awards focused on children’s books.

Presented by the Jenkins Group and Independent Publisher Online, the Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards are designed “to bring increased recognition to exemplary children’s books and their creators, and to support childhood literacy and life-long reading”. Awards are given in 36 categories covering the full range of subjects, styles and age groups that children’s books are written and published in today.

The Moonbeam Awards are intended for authors, illustrators, publishers and self-publishers of children’s books, written in English and intended for the North American market.

Heeeyyyy! The huge debate and protests had an impact! Bloomsbury has changed the cover for Justine Larbalestier’s forthcoming YA novel, LIAR!

The previous cover was controversial because it showed a white teenaged girl, whereas the book’s protagonist is biracial (black/white.) Larbalestier, who is a white Australian author, tried to change the cover behind the scenes, but when she was unsuccessful, she wrote about it on her blog. The book’s editor threw fuel on the fire of the ensuing controversy by claiming that the cover was intended to deepen the mindf*ck; because the book’s protag, who is a pathological liar, is the one who tells us that she is biracial. Nobody bought that, though.

So now that they’ve caved to pressure, it’s up to us to show them that audiences really DO read books with POC on the cover. Go buy it!