The Ditmars were announced last night and the live blog of the ceremony can be found on SFAW. My particular thanks to Cat Sparks and Rob Hood for dropping by. It is always good have winners in the audience.

I was pleased to see that the Best Fan Production award went to an online book review zine: AS if!.

But what I most want to talk about now is a brand new award which was announced here and will have its first presentation at Aussiecon 4 next year. The Norma K Hemming Award is a diversity award for “exploration of themes of race, gender, class and sexuality”. It is named after Norma Kathleen Hemming, a feminist author and fan who was active in Australia in the 1950s and died tragically of lung cancer at the age of 33. You can find more about Norma, the award and early Australian feminist fandom at the Australian Science Fiction Foundation web site.

Precise details of how the award will work are still being ironed out, but it will be a juried award. Given that it is diversity-based, and not just feminist, I asked about disability issues. The ASFF folks promised to look into this, but someone else in the audience suggested that the Australian disability community might not be happy about being included. You do have to check these things.

Still, I am delighted to see Australian launch an award of this type. We already have the Tiptree and Carl Brandon Awards, and the feminist award in Japan. There may be others I’m not award of, but as far as I know the UK doesn’t have anything like this.