Well, headlines anyway…

This being the year of the Montréal Worldcon, it seems to be a good time to look into what is happening in the genre community in French-speaking countries, and in particular in France. I’m off to London tomorrow afternoon, and on an early morning Eurostar to Paris, and then TGV to Epinal, where I will be attending Imaginales, one of France’s biggest conventions.

As part of my preparation for that I have been looking at the annual awards they present. The Prix Imaginales are something like the World Fantasy Awards, except for work in French rather than English. There’s information about them on the SF Awards Watch site. You can see from the nominees for the Translated Novel category that our French friends have excellent taste in literature. Swordspoint and King of Morning, Queen of Day are two of my favorite fantasy novels, and the rest of the list is very impressive too.

Interestingly the YA and short fiction categories are open to translated fiction as well as works originally written in French. Thus we find Kelly Link (of course) in the running for the short fiction prize, and three translated novels in the YA category. Hopefully you are all familiar with Walter Moers because I have reviewed one of his books. Licia Troisi is an Italian writer who, according to Wikipedia, is also a professional astrophysicist.

For information on the French writers and artists I am relying on the help of the folks at Galaxies magazine. Gillian Gray has been enormously helpful already, and I’m hoping to meet up with Pierre Gévart at the convention. More information about the current French-language SF&F scene should follow.

I see from the con schedule that there is a program item about Worldcon on Thursday evening, and I will make sure I am at that, but I shall leave most of the talking to Jean-Louis Trudel because he’s a native French-speaker and my French is still atrocious. Hopefully it will be better by the end of the weekend.

Fortunately there will be a few English-speakers about. David Anthony Durham, Hal Duncan and Bruce Holland Rogers are all guests of the convention. I’m also hope that Andreas Eschbach and Andrzej Sapkowski speak good English because I really like their books.

And finally I hope to spend a little time at Le Musée de l’Image, which looks to be totally awesome (25,000 works of art, from the 17th Century to the present day).