I’m pretty partial to the Sunburst Award — not just because I was shortlisted for it at one point, and not just because I judged it at another point — but because it stands as a… well, not quite an extended middle finger (this is Canada, after all) but perhaps a polite stuck-out tongue at the seemingly impenetrable wall of quote unquote CanLit.  These speculative fiction folks… they got it going on.

The Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic is a prized and juried award that is presented annually. Named after the debut novel by Phyllis Gotlieb, one of the first published authors of contemporary Canadian speculative fiction, the award consists of a cash prize of $1,000 and a hand-crafted medallion, which incorporates the “Sunburst” logo, designed by Marcel Gagné. It is based on excellence of writing; the jury selects five short-listed works and one winner, representing the finest of Canadian fantastic literature published during the 2008 calendar year.

As someone who once read for the prize, I gotta tell you, there’s a (metric) shitload of Canadian fantastic literature published every year (and working it down to a shortlist was NOT easy).  I don’t envy the judges this year, but somehow they managed to come up with a shortlist.