World Fantasy Award Judges Announced

And the big news (for me, at least) is: I'm one of them. I was asked by John Douglas, one of the vast and cool intellects behind the awards, at last year's WFC, and I immediately agreed. And then immediately afterward wondered what I had gotten myself into. My other silly thought was to wonder if they ask every professional to be a judge during their first WFC, when they're still young and happy and gullible.

My fellow judges are Steve Lockley (whom I don't know, but seems to be a British writer of either YA or horror or both), Barbara Roden (who I also haven't met, but who is one-half of the very well-regarded Canadian small press Ash-Tree Press), Victoria Strauss (yet another person I haven't met, though we did a couple of her novels in the SFBC) and Jeff VanderMeer (our most famous judge this year, a strongly up-and-coming literary fantasy writer/editor/ex-small-publisher who I said hello to very briefly at WFC). I imagine I'll get to know them better over the next nine months; I only hope our tastes turn out to be reasonably compatible.

Now the work of trying to read every fantasy novel, story, collection and anthology published in 2005 begins...