It’s Ditmar nominating time!

The nomination period for the Ditmar awards is now open. All works must have been published for the first time in 2011 to be eligible. There’s a quite comprehensive list of eligible works for all categories over here – if there are things missing, you can add to it, cos it’s a wiki 🙂

Once you’ve figured out what you’d like to nominate, head over here and do it! Just about everyone is eligible to nominate (to vote on the final shortlists, you have to be a Natcon member from 2011 or for 2012, but no such restrictions for nomination).

For reference, I’ve listed below things that FableCroft or me are eligible for – I do encourage you to go look at that lovely big list of eligible works though, because there was some brilliant stuff put out last year!

After the Rain is eligible for Best Collected Work, as are all the stories it contains (all Best Short Story category):

from the dry heart to the sea by joanne anderton

powerplant by dave luckett

daughters of the deluge by lyn battersby

when the bone men come by peter cooper

the birth of water cities by angela rega

wet work by jason nahrung

fruit of the pipal tree by thoraiya dyer

europe after the rain by lee battersby

heaven by jo langdon

visitors by peter m ball

mouseskin by kathleen jennings

offerings by suzanne j willis

the shadow on the city of my sky by robert hoge

my flood husband by sally newham

eschaton and coda by dirk flinthart

And the cover art for the book, by Gaston Locanto, is certainly eligible for Best Artwork.

In other categories, I am eligible for Best Fan Writer, and for the William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism and Review, both the blog series on the Vorkosigan Saga that Alex Pierce and I did, and the ongoing “Reviewing New Who” series (David McDonald, Tansy Rayner Roberts and me) are eligible.

I also contributed to the Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus reviews site (as a writer and maintainer) and to the Natcon Fifty Souvenir Book (layout and design by Amanda Rainey, contributors = fandom), both of which are eligible for Best Fan Publication.

It would be remiss of me to not recommend to you a couple of my favourites from the past year:

Joanne Anderton is eligible for Best New Talent (and well and truly deserves it, for my mind – her debut novel, Debris, is excellent (and also eligible in the Novel category!).

Kathleen Jennings is also eligible for Best New Talent, and her artwork on the cover of The Freedom Maze and in the graphic story “Finishing School” from Steampunk!: An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories are both eligible for Best Artwork. In a really clever trick, Kathleen is also eligible for Best Fan Artist, particularly for her very cool series “The Dalek Game“.

That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed a big stack of other work this year, and I will be nominating accordingly, but PLEASE check out the eligibles for yourself and NOMINATE!