Hello USA. Everyone recovered from their turkey-induced stupor yet?

As you almost certainly didn’t notice last week, being preoccupied with other things, I’d like to draw your attention to the fund raiser that we are running for the SF&F Translation Awards. There are a bunch of cool prizes available for some lucky donors, and since we started the thing I have had a few kind people contact me with offers of additional prizes. We’ll announce them in due course, once we are sure we won’t be paying out more in postage than we get in from donations.

I shall probably be a bit boring about this over the next month or so, because I do want these awards to be prestigious and not just something that a bunch of nutty fans and academics care about. There are loads of fabulous authors in the non-English-speaking world, but we’ll only get translations published if we can get our own publishers away from thinking that no one will ever buy a translated novel, which sadly many of them do.

It would be great if I could tap into arts funding for this, but money for that has been horribly slashed in the UK recently. The EU has arts money available, but only for projects that are limited to EU countries. As our winners may come from Japan, or Brazil, or anywhere else outside Europe, we wouldn’t qualify. And of course it is always likely that any grant application would be turned down on the grounds that science fiction isn’t worth supporting. So it really is down to us. If you can’t afford to donate anything yourself, please at least blog about it to help spread the word.

Full details, including the current list of prizes, are available here.