Last night I was a guest on episode #85 of the fabulous Coode Street Podcast. Jonathan got it online while I was asleep. I listened to it this morning and it isn’t too embarrassing. I wasn’t at my sharpest, as we recorded it between 23:00 and midnight my time and I’d had a busy day, but I really must stop saying “um” so much. Also there’s one mistake in there that I spotted as I was saying it but was too tired to think of a graceful way out of.

Most of the conversation is about the Hugos — Gary and Jonathan have me down as their resident expert on rules matters, though I did have to check with Kevin at one point.

During the discussion, Jonathan came up with one very interesting idea. He suggested that instead of having an Editor: Long Form category, the editor of the winning Novel would get a trophy alongside the author. There’s a lot of merit in that idea — in particular it would share the glory around a lot, and shine a spotlight on a bunch of people that we never hear about. Of course there would then be arguments that the editors of the winning short fiction, related work and graphic story should get trophies too, which probably means it would never happen. However, one thing we can do is identify who edited some of the highly fancied novels from 2011. I’ll get back to that during the week.

The other thing we talk about is the Translation Awards, for which Gary is the President of the Board of Directors, and Kevin & I have also been involved. The reason we did that is that the awards have just started another fund raiser, so that they can give financial prizes to more translators and non-English-speaking writers. There’s an amazing selection of prizes on offer. You can see them here, and I expect more to be added in the coming weeks. If you want to know what works are up for the prizes this year, you can find them here.