The James White Award is open to entrants from all over the world. The judging of the Award is designed to try to minimise the possibility of bias in the selection of the best story. We ask entrants to send their manuscripts with all details of their names and addresses removed and all judging is done anonymously. This year, for the first time (thanks to the support of the British Science Fiction Association), we were able to remove the entrance fee for the award to encourage a wider range of applicants. As well as receiving the shortlisted stories stripped of identifying marks, the James White Award judges receive the final shortlist in a single format – our goal is to do as much as possible to ensure that stories are judged simply by the words on the page.

Below we’ve attempted to breakdown some of the basic demographic information regarding this year’s (2011) Award. We hope to improve the collection of demographic data over the next few years so we can target the award more effectively at new and emerging writers.

We received 246 valid entries to this year’s Award.

Gender

Female: 41% Male: 59%

(This figure is based on analysis of the names of the entrants – around 4% of entrants could not be identified as either male or female and have been excluded. The final shortlist was 50% male writers, 50% female.)

Geographical spread

Europe

North America

Australasia

Asia

Africa

Other

The final shortlist consisted of three stories from the UK, one from Australia, one from China and one from the USA.

The future

While we want to continue to encourage writers from the UK and USA to submit to the Award, we hope that over the coming years we can do more to attract writers from outside these two nations (together they accounted for 85% of entries this year). We are keen to hear from writers and fans in other nations about ways we might promote the award in their countries/regions and how we might make the award easier to enter.