The James White Award is pleased to announce the panel of authors who will select the winner of the 2018 James White Award.

Our judges are:

ANNE CHARNOCK
Anne Charnock’s novella, The Enclave, won this year’s British Science Fiction Association Award for best short fiction, her Dreams Before the Start of Time is (our) favourite for the 2018 Arthur C Clarke Award (and was nominated for the BSFA Best Novel) and A Calculated Life was shortlisted for the Kitchies Golden Tentacle and Philip K Dick award. 2015’s Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind may not have been nominated for awards, but it’s a wonderful novel. She is a journalist and former foreign correspondent. She tweets as @annecharnock and you can find out more about her at http://annecharnock.com

RJ BARKER
The author of the fantastic The Wounded Kingdom trilogy, stories of the assassin Girton Club-Foot, his books have been widely praised and nominated for Kitschies Golden Tentacle, Gemmell and British Fantasy (best novel and best newcomer) awards. Having given up on the life of a rockstar, RJ lives in Leeds and (amongst other things) he reveals his (often disturbing) fascination with antlers in his tweets as @dedbutdrmng – you can read more about him and his work on his website: http://www.rjbarker.com

UNA MCCORMACK
Probably best known for her novels published in the Star Trek and Dr Who universes, Dr. Una McCormack is a lecturer in creative writing at Anglia Ruskin University. Her 2013 Star Trek novel The Fall: The Crimson Shadow was a New York Times bestseller. Recently she has published two exciting space operas set in the Weird Space universe – The Baba Yaga (with Eric Brown) and The Star And The Sea and an excellent novella The Greatest Story Ever Told has just been published by NewCon Press. She has also written numerous audio dramas for Big Finish in the Dr Who and Blake’s 7 universes. Follow her online on Twitter @unamccormack.

The shortlisted stories will be announced soon.

This year’s James White Award has opened to submissions.

The competition will accept entries until midnight (BST) on Friday 27 April, 2018 and the winner will be announced in July 2018 (date to be confirmed).

The Award Administrator, Martin McGrath, noted that the competition had changed its schedule this year: “In the past we have sought to announce our winning story earlier in the year, traditionally at Eastercon, but have struggled to keep to that timetable. We hope that by moving the judging period into the summer that it will help us stay on schedule and to make the competition more reliable and predictable for those who enter.”

This year’s panel of judges will be announced in January.

This year’s prize is £200 and the winning story will be published in Interzone.

The James White Award Short Story Competition was founded in 2000 to commemorate the work of Irish science fiction author, James White. It is supported by the BSFA and TTA Press, publisher’s of Interzone, the UK’s longest-running science fiction magazine.

We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2017 James White Award is:

“The Morrigan”
by Stewart Horn

Commenting on the winning story on behalf of the judging panel, David Gullen said:
“The Morrigan works very well, a very tight piece of writing, confident and accomplished. It breaks the rule on colloquial speech and not only makes it work but is stronger for it. An original take on a very old tale with good pace, and sense of time and place.”

Stewart’s story wins £200 and will be published in a future issue of Interzone.

This year the judges also chose to give a special commendation to:

“May the Pain Guide You Home”
by Daniel Roy

Award Adminstrator Martin McGrath said:
“Daniel’s story scored highly with all the judges, it packs a powerful emotional punch in a well-written and tightly told story.”

The winning story was chosen from an entry of almost 200 entrants this year.

Commiserations to the authors of the other shortlisted stories:

• “Don” by Steve Dubois
• “Skin and Bone” by Beth Plutchak
• “The Cut” by Elsie WK Donald
• “The Dying Glass” by Cameron Johnston

although they didn’t win this time they made the judging process difficult and it was a significant achievement to reach this stage in the competition.

Thank you to this year’s judges: Lorna Gibbs, David Gullen and Konrad Walewski for their time and the care they gave to the judging. Thanks, too, to the team behind the scenes that make the award possible and to all those who have supported the Award.

The James White Award also thanks TTA Press and editor their Andy Cox and the British Science Fiction Association for their continued support.

We have had some difficulties with the organisation of this year’s award that have caused significant delays in making announcement and so we thank everyone who entered for their patience. We’ll be announcing some changes to the competition next year in the hope of avoiding a repeat. These will be announced on the website soon.

The James White Award will reopen to entries in September 2017.

The winner of the James White Award 2017 will be announced here at 9:00pm (BST) on Monday 26 June.

We are pleased to be able to announce the shortlist for this year’s competition.

The stories that have made it through to the final selection are:

Don – Steve Dubois
May the Pain Guide You Home – Daniel Roy
The Morrigan – Stewart Horn
Skin and Bone – Beth Plutchak
The Cut – Elsie WK Donald
The Dying Glass – Cameron Johnston

The winner will be announced next week.

Apologies to all this year’s competition entrants for the delays in getting to this stage. Stories not listed here should be considered released for consideration in other markets.

This year’s judging panel are:

Lorna Gibb
Lorna is a novelist, short story and non fiction writer. She has published two biographies, Lady Hester (Faber 2005), the Sperber shortlisted West’s World (Pan Mac 2012) and the critically acclaimed novel A Ghost’s Story (Granta 2015), as well as short fiction for literary magazines and Radio broadcast and the award winning memoir, ‘The Two Gardens’. She is currently writing a book on Childlessness, commissioned by Granta. Lorna lives in Hertfordshire with her husband and three rescue cats, is represented by Peter Straus at RCW Lit Agency and lectures part time in creative writing at Middlesex University.

David Gullen
David is a white African writer whose short fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies. His work has won the British Fantasy Society short story competition and his collection, Open Waters, is published by Exaggerated Press. In 2016 he was also a judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His SF novel, Shopocalypse, is due to be re-issued by NewCon Press this summer. David lives in South London with the fantasy writer Gaie Sebold behind a small forest of tree ferns.

Konrad Waleski
Editor, writer, anthologist, literary critic and translator, Konrad is a prominent figure in the Polish Science Fiction and Fantasy scene. Hie is co-founder of, and editor for, the Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy in Poland. He has translated works such as Synners by Pat Cadigan and Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link and his anthologies include three volumes of Kroki w nieznane (Steps into the Unknown) and Wielkie dzieło czasu (Great Work of Time). He currently lives in London.

The James White Award is pleased to be able to announce the longlisted stories for this year’s award. These are:

• The Astronaut Tier
• Carriola
• Corinna, Fractured
• Dagher’s Children
• Don
• Exposure
• Leviathanology
• May the Pain Guide You Home
• Morrigan
• Shepherd Boy Balances the Hundred Souls
• Sim World Scripting Derby
• Skin and Bone
• The Cut
• The Devil’s Breath
• The Dying Glass
• The Origin of Serendipity
• Tumbler

Authors of other submissions can consider their stories released.

We hope to announce the shortlist within two weeks and the winner shortly afterwards.

Note that, at this stage, the stories are still being judged using our anonymous system, hence no authors’ names can be included at this time.

The award administrator, Martin McGrath, apologised to the delays in this year’s competition: “We know it is frustrating for authors who are waiting for a response and we’re taking steps to ensure that this doesn’t happen again in future. We will be announcing changes to the competition’s timing for future competitions before opening for next year’s submissions. Thank you for sticking with us.”

With apologies to those who have entered this year’s competition, we are sorry to announce that the announcement of this year’s James White Award winner has been delayed.

The longlist will announced shortly after Easter and the shortlist shortly after that. We are working to complete the judging as quickly as possible.

We intend to announce the winner by Friday, 19 May at the latest.

Thank you for your patience.

Congratulations to this year’s winner of the James White Award:

David Cleden 
for the story 
“Rock, Paper, Incisors”

David will receive £200 and his story will be published in a forthcoming issue of Interzone, the UK’s leading science fiction magazine. The winner was announced at the BSFA Award Ceremony held tonight at Mancunicon.

Commiserations to the shortlisted finalists:

Trina Marie Phillips – Deadly Dance
Jason Kimble – If Only Kissing Made It So
Morgan Parks – Let the Bells Ring Out
Matt Dove – (Perhaps The Answer Is) That We Question At All
Jon Lasser – Wreckwalkers

And thank you to all the authors who took part in this year’s competitions. As noted before, we received a record entry and the competition was close.

Announcing the award, and speaking for fellow judges Ruth EJ Booth and Ian Sales, Neil Williamson said:

“The James White Award was created not just in commemoration, but to celebrate and encourage fresh, exciting voices in genre. So the judges were delighted this year to find such imaginative stories amongst the shortlisted titles. The winning story was not only well-realised, but had a genuine and striking spark of originality that piqued the curiosity of the judges. With its cohesive storytelling and confident execution, David Cleden’s “Rock, Paper, Scissors” was a clear winner for the whole panel.”

Thank you to our judges, to those who contributed to the work of the award, everyone who has donated this year and to Interzone and the BSFA for their continued support of the award.

The James White Award will open to entries again in June 2016. Keep an eye on this website or our Twitter feed @jameswhiteaward for more details.