(Untitled)

[l_zinkiewicz]

I know I'm going to alienate people by posting this, but the Aurealis Awards for the Young Adults category, in relation to at least the short story category, are going to be totally lacking in credibility & meaningfulness this year.
No offence to any finalist in the category, but this year's shortlist for the short story category is a total farce.

Comments

[kerravonsen]

I tend to take awards with a grain of salt anyway; at least, in the sense that being nominated is a recommendation in the first place, because I may not have the same taste as the judges/voters (depending on what type of award it is).

It becomes harder with SF/F short stories, because there seem to be only a limited number of publications which deal in short stories -- novels are much more accessable. Or maybe it's just that I tend to read novels much much more than short stories.

[l_zinkiewicz]

If awards didn't have such an impact on anthology/periodical sales (& probably on authors' futures), the fact they reflect judges' tastes wouldn't be such a problem to me. Un(?)fortunately, they do. And when the judges have a very restricted range of stories to choose from the problem is exacerbated.

[mortonhall]

As a YA professional, I'm desperately trying to remember what other YA genre stories were produced in 2006...

I can't remember there being a awful lot of them last year

[l_zinkiewicz]

Perhaps another reason for abolishing the category?

[avt_tor]

It's hard to maintain quality of an award in a small market, and yet, building up a history builds interest and lays a foundation for future works in the field. The question is, is this just a lean year, or is this a problem category every year? Is there a community of YA writers for which this is an important award to aspire to?

[thinarthur]

Is "Young Adults" Newspeak for teens? If so, I would expect that catagory to cover fiction which has plotting & themes considered too complex for children under twelve but which does not contain detailed mature psychosocial themes and/or graphic sex & violence. Obviously there's a lot of fuzzy edge stuff which doesn't quite fit into that one way or the other but usually authors/publishers are aiming at a specific market and will say what sort of age group the stories are aimed at.

Re the actual problem you describe, this could be fixed by having ground rules on minimum nominations levels. If there are so few nominated stories/authors so as to make the catagory meaningless then have no award for it that year. I believe this has happened with other well known award ceremonies from time to time.