The Kitschies: Winners, Playlists & 2013
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Last night was The Kitschies' awards ceremony. This was only our second year of making a "thing" out of the presentation, and the first year of it being a stand-alone event, so we were a little nervous how it might go.
Thanks to a lot of rum, wonderfully enthusiastic guests and a lot of hard work from the Free Word Centre, we think it came together pretty well. As always, please send us suggestions on how we could improve the evening ([email protected]).
The stars of the evening were the winners:
- Nick Harkaway for Angelmaker (William Heinemann) for the Red Tentacle
- Karen Lord for Redemption in Indigo (Jo Fletcher Books) for the Golden Tentacle
- Dave Shelton for A Boy and a Bear in a Boat (David Fickling Books) for the Inky Tentacle
- The World SF Blog for the Black Tentacle
One of the benefits of this year's set-up was that there were fewer acceptances by proxy, with Nick Harkaway, Jo Fletcher (Karen Lord is on a plane to Australia), Dave Shelton and Lavie Tidhar all there to pick up their prizes. Lavie wore his Tentacle as a scarf for the rest of evening. Nick has since blogged his thoughts about what "progressive speculative fiction" might be... it is a long and brilliant read, so make a cup of tea and settle in for it.
The Free Word Centre did an amazing job of hosting the evening. It wound up being a perfect squeeze, with exactly two more people than we had seats (and that counts Plarchie hogging an extra chair) - next year we'll have to find more chairs (or fewer finalists?).
Rob Sharp's Storify provides an excellent recap of the shenanigans. Plus loads of photos via Sarah McIntyre and the Tor team. Even the Guardian ran a wonderfully tentacular picture of the evening...
The playlist for the evening was provided by finalists past and present. It is insane.
UPDATE: [There's now a Spotify version, courtesy of @inCatastrophe!]
The prediction contest was closely fought. Over seventy answers but no one called all three. However, four people picked two correctly, so it'll come down to the tie-breaker...
In the madness, we made a couple of announcements about 2013. Our next event will be April 30 at the Brixton Ritzy, with guests Lauren Beukes, Warren Ellis and Ben Percy. The topic will be "storytelling without limits", which is the sort of wonderfully vague phrase that gives the evening plenty of rope with which to hang itself. Tickets will go on sale soon through the Ritzy's box office.
We'll also be at the Bristol Festival of Literature doing an event with space squid. Because.
Finally, and this is a weird thing to think about, but The Kitschies will be opening for submissions in the late spring. There are a couple of small changes from last year's submissions policy - the most of important of which is that physical copies of books will no longer be required.
Thanks again to, well, everyone - judges, board members, reviewers, finalists, publishers, authors, the Free Word Centre (who are simply amazing), The Kraken Rum and everyone that reads, tweets, shouts and discusses this sort of stuff.