Archive for Awards

Orbit goes digital first with THE WINDUP GIRL

Time Magazine named The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi as one of its ten best novels of the year. And the book has also won an extraordinary five of 2010’s major international SF awards: the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook Award and John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

To take advantage of the huge buzz for this book (read a free extract HERE), Orbit is taking the unusual step of releasing the ebook edition immediately, as the fastest way of getting this important work to a UK audience. The paperback print edition will be out later, from 2nd December. We are very excited to publish this in the UK, as the extraordinary word-of-mouth excitement for this work in the States has been tremendous and now UK fans will have access to this wonderful book. (more…)

FEED is a Killer Thriller!

NPR ran a listener contest to determine the best 100 thriller novels of all time and we are absolutely delighted to announce that our own Mira Grant made it on the list at a very respectable #74! When your competition is Stephen King, Dashiell Hammett, and Stieg Larsson, #74 is killer indeed…

Check out the full list here!

And pop over to congratulate Mira on her twitter feed: @MiraGrant (aka @seananmcguire)

Winners! Spectrum Annual #17!

I know all of you are scifi/fantasy geeks (or else why are you here, really), but not all of you are art geeks as well, so you may not have heard of Spectrum, the annual competition for contemporary scifi/fantasy/horror art…but to those of us you might classify as “geek artists”, inclusion in the Spectrum annual is a big deal. So I am thrilled to announce that 3 of our books made the annual:

Black Ships by Jo Graham (painting by John Jude Palencar)

Tempest Rising by Nicole Peeler (digital illustration by Sharon Tancredi)

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin (digital illustration by Cliff Nielsen)

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Brighton Shock – notes on the World Horror Convention 2010

Last weekend I attended the fabulous World Horror Convention in Brighton, a celebration of horror fiction from the Victorian age to the present, and the first time this event has been held outside North America.

Horror is a fascinating area and, as with SF and fantasy fiction, the definition seems interestingly fluid and has the capacity to evolve in new and exciting ways with each new generation of writers. We have the legacy of 19th century gothic horror (Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe and Bram Stoker). This was followed by Lovecraftian horror, and more recently we have seen contemporary horror wordsmiths such as Stephen King, James Herbert and Ramsey Campbell.

One of the highlights of the convention was watching Neil Gaiman interview grand master of modern horror James Herbert (while I sat next to the agent who discovered him). Neil Gaiman appeared unannounced as a surprise guest interviewer, and it was as if Elvis had entered the building as news of his arrival rippled tantalisingly through the convention … James Herbert focused on his epic career and on his underprivileged East End origins which inspired him to write. It’s interesting to think how the supernatural thriller/disaster fiction of the 1970s and 80s, turbulent decades of wealth and deprivation lived under the shadow of the bomb, might differ to what is being produced today.

We now have an explosion of new vampire fiction, as Kelley Armstrong discussed with other (more…)

Only days left to vote on both Gemmell and Locus Awards …

There seems to be plenty of award talk going around at the moment, with the Clarke Award lists of nominees out, British Fantasy Society Awards longlists released and the BSFA only a few weeks away from its own Awards announcements. Perhaps these represent the first signs of Spring for the genre community…

But currently more pressing than all of the above are the imminent voting deadlines for the David Gemmell Awards (a few days away, with voting closing at the end of March) and the annual Locus Awards ballot (closing 1st April). The David Gemmell Awards are designed to honour the memory of David Gemmell and also to raise the profile of fantasy fiction in the UK, and this will be their second year. The whole team is crossing fingers for all our authors on the Gemmell longlists, including those down for the Legend Award for best fantasy novel here. You can also vote by following that link – and see above for the cute mini-Snaga that Brent Weeks was awarded last year for his shortlisted The Way of Shadows (UK I US). Also included within ‘the Gemmells’ are the Morningstar Award for best fantasy debut and the Ravenheart Award for best fantasy cover art.

The Locus Awards are in their 40th year and their longlist is the prestigious Locus Recommended Reading List of works published in 2009. So as well as crossing fingers for the Gemmells, we are also holding our collective breaths for Orbit authors in various Locus categories (this could get complicated!). Orbit nominees are  Iain M. Banks, Walter Jon Williams, Daniel Abraham, Gail Carriger and Charles Stross.  You can vote for the Locus Awards here.

2009: A Very Good Year

The first week of December.

The days are getting darker, our in-trays are beginning to empty (we wish), the communal surfaces are beginning to grow fat with baked goods and illicit seasonal beverages . . .

As we hurtle towards the New Year (at FTL travel inducing velocity and with a blood-biscuit level that would make even Alexia Tarabotti proud) the Orbit UK Team has banded together to bring you a retrospective on what made 2009 another great year. The short answer of course is great authors, Global Vision, plenty of awards and um, you.  But humour us, read on below the cut, you’ll like it (or at least learn something) we promise! (more…)

New York Book Show 09 Winners!

450_Poster2010The New York Book Show is an annual competition held by the Bookbinders’ Guild of New York, which is a professional publishing organization focusing on design & production of all kinds of trade, academic, and specialty books. It’s one of the few design competitions every year that focuses just on books, and I entered some of our Orbit titles from 2009.

The judging was just completed, and Soulless by Gail Carriger & Tempest Rising by Nicole Peeler both won in the mass market paperback cover design category. Thanks to everyone who was involved in the cover designs, especially Donna Ricci, our model for Alexia Tarabotti & mistress of all things Steampunk Fashion, and Sharon Tancredi, the illustrator for Tempest Rising. Go Team!

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The David Gemmell Awards

On Friday night, Orbit UK attended the inaugural David Gemmell Legend Award for Fantasy, and a thoroughly enjoyable night was had by all. We were particularly excited, with our Brent Weeks on the five-book shortlist for The Way of Shadows [UK/US/ANZ]. Brent didn’t actually carry off the final award, but to win his place on the shortlist he fought off a strong list of almost eighty nominees so no mean feat. Surely Kylar would be proud!

The black-tie event was rather appropriately held at the Magic Circle headquarters in London, and we had to scale a rune-encrusted spiral staircase to reach the intimate plushly-red theatre. Or take the lift. All very atmospheric. And we were then treated to a short piece from Druss’s call to arms, read by James Barclay, before the ceremony itself. Our Hachette sister company Gollancz published the winning title in the UK, Blood of Elves, by Polish fantasy author Andrzej Sapkowski. However, as already reported, this was published by Orbit in the US so we also had cause to celebrate this too.

Jo Fletcher of Gollancz received the award itself – a huge great axe – on behalf of Andrzej Sapkowski courtesy of the Raven Armoury, but the short-listed authors also gained their very own mini-Snaga axes (to fight off the competition in future, no doubt …) We caught a few shots of Brent Weeks’ prize before putting it in the post to him, so see below for these. Other highlights included a charity auction, where prizes such as a rare first edition of Legend, use of a Jaguar for the weekend and the right to be written into Stan Nicholls’ next novel were up for grabs. Money raised went to Medecins Sans Frontieres. Here are some other comments, pictures, blogs etc. from the night from the British Fantasy Society, SFX and the MyFavouriteBooks blog.

The award itself is designed to honour the memory of David Gemmell and also to raise the profile of fantasy fiction in the UK. We don’t currently have a fantasy award to call our own, and organiser Deborah Miller and her team thought it was high time they did something about this, helped by French genre publishers Bragelonne, sponsoring this year’s event. Read more on Deborah’s mission here. Certainly the first event was a huge success and long may it continue! It’s great that fantasy talent can be recognised and rewarded in this way and if brings more people to enjoy the books, that’s great news too. And that’s not just from the Publisher’s point of view, honest.

There are plenty of fine things said about The Way of Shadows [UK/US/ANZ] on the Gemmell Award site and other reasons to read the book, if more are needed, are as follows:

‘A proper good yarn … Weeks tells his tale skilfully and tautly. And he dazzles with some jaw-dropping moments’ SFX
‘This unapologetically grim fantasy fable serves up a heady mix …. never wears out its 650-page welcome’ DeathRay
‘The most impressive debut novel I’ve read this year’ SFFworld.com

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