Recently, the Orbit team—thank you, Orbit team!—posted that The Heir of Night (The Wall of Night 1) had been shortlisted for a Sir Julius Vogel Award.

But it occurred to me that although Orbit blog readers are switched-on SFF folk, not everyone will necessarily have heard of this award from the far side of the world. So “just in case”, here’s a little background.

The Sir Julius Vogel Awards are a reader-voted award made annually under the auspices of SFFANZ, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Association of New Zealand, to recognise achievement in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror by New Zealanders or New Zealand residents. Like other science fiction and fantasy awards around the globe, the Sir Julius Vogels include both professional and fan categories for various forms of writing, artwork, dramatic presentation, and editing.

The Award itself was designed by Weta Workshops, which has been involved with the making of a large number of major films, most famously The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

The reason why it’s called the Sir Julius Vogel Award, when Sir Julius was a nineteenth century NZ prime minister—is because he is also held to be NZ’s first speculative fiction author, publishing a novel called Anno Domini 2000 – A Woman’s Destiny in 1889. The premise of the book is one where women have achieved suffrage (which NZ actually enacted in 1893, just four years later) and gone on to hold major positions of authority in politics, law and industry. Given that shortly after 2000, NZ’s prime minister, as well as our governor general, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and the chief executive of NZ’s largest private company, were all women, Sir Julius’s speculation is now held to be uncommonly prescient …

As both a New Zealander and a New Zealand-based SFF author, I am honoured that The Heir of Night has been shortlisted for a Sir Julius Vogel Award 2011. The Awards will be announced at a ceremony in Auckland, at the National Science Fiction Fantasy Convention, on Sunday 6 June.