As you will see from various news outlets over the next few days, the Directors of the SF&F Translation Awards, of whom I am one, have jointly decided to cease giving out the Awards and wind up the corporation that administers them. You can find the official press release here.

What follows are purely personal reflections on why we had to do this.

As the press release says, the main issue was simply time. Several of us have had major changes in our lives since the Awards were started, and we simply can’t do the work anymore. I have tried on a number of occasions to get more people involved, and the silence in response has been deafening.

Of course you may be wondering why I couldn’t give up some of the other volunteer work that I do and concentrate on the Awards instead. There are a number of reasons for this.

Firstly, not being involved with the Awards will make it easier for me to publish translations through Wizard’s Tower. While I was a Director of the Awards I would have to recuse any new work I published from consideration. I am now free from that constraint and hope to publish some original translations.

More importantly, however, I couldn’t do it all by myself. Rob Latham and his colleagues at UC Riverside were key to the operation of the awards because they had the contacts and prestige necessary to find jurors and to get free books from publishers. There’s no way I could have done that, especially being stuck in the UK where who you are always matters far more than what you are doing.

Finally I have been telling my fellow Directors for some time that they needed someone else to be the public face of the Awards. Kevin and I are both regarded as “Old White Men” as far as many progressive voices in fandom are concerned. As a result of this I felt that the Awards were unlikely to get full support from pro-diversity campaigners if they were closely associated with me. It is far more important that translations should get promoted than that I should be involved in doing so. I have some hope that now I am out of the way someone will come forward and found a new set of awards that will be more acceptable to fandom.