Celebrating Friends’ Successes
Perhaps this blog post should just be “celebrating friends” because friends, after all, are pretty important in this life. But in fact the title is correct: what I am specifically celebrating is friend’ recent successes, and more specifically again, those enjoyed by fellow writers.
Because recently several friends-in-writing have enjoyed some good ‘wins.’
Firstly, I’ve mentioned the Gemmell Awards a couple of times, here and here, mainly in terms of The Heir of Night’s nomination for both the Morningstar and Legend Awards. The Legend Award is for the Best Fantasy Novel (in the heroic/epic subgenre) published in English in 2011—and both my friends’ Mary Victoria and Kim Falconer have not one but two books longlisted for this award. Mary’s books are Samiha’s Song and Oracle’s Fire from her Chronicles of the Tree trilogy, while Kim’s novels are from her Quantum Encryption series: Journey by Night and Road to the Soul. But not one but two novels in the longlist for the Legend Award: I think that’s a fairly awesome achievement!
The NZ Post Children’s Book Awards‘ shortlist was also released recently and several friends featured:
James Norcliffe—who wrote a guest post here on “Why FSF Rocks” in 2010—has The Loblolly Boy & The Sorcerer (Random House) shortlisted in the Junior Fiction category; while
Jane Higgins’ The Bridge (Text Publishing) and Joanna Orwin’s Sacrifice (HarperCollins) are both contenders for the Young Adult award.
Jane is also a guest at the Writers and Readers component of the NZ International Arts Festival this weekend, appearing in two events: Christchurch Quakes–Changing Everything and with Bernard Beckett in Terrific Characters: Dystopian Worlds. And I was rather chuffed when Jane asked if she could read my poem Storm Front (posted here) as part of the Christchurch Quakes event.
Now speaking of Awards–the nomination period for the Sir Julius Vogel Awards is still open until 31 March and all the books mentioned above—except for Kim’s Falconer’s two works, Kim being an Aussie ‘n’ all—are eligible for nomination. I really would urge you to read these books if you haven’t already and to consider nomination–not just for these books but for all those on the “eligible” list, here.
*g* thanks for the mention, Helen. Counting down to Gathering now!
That’s another “G” – whiz! 😉
But ‘my pleasure’ re the mention.
Thank you, Helen, for the big shout out. Friends are worth celebrating and writer friends up for awards all the more so! My motto is, we all succeed together!
And what Mary said. Counting down to the Gathering!!!!
I liked something Charles Tan retweeted today: “The point is to remember to be thankful to all the others who helped you. That’s what luck really is: other people helping you.” And celebrating others’ success is a big part of that, I feel …