Kirkus has announced its selections for Best Fiction of 2019, including titles and authors of genre interest in several categories:

Jim Freund’s venerable SF radio call-in show Hour of the Wolf has gone off the air after nearly 50 years. The show aired on WBAI 99.5 FM in New York, but on October 8, 2019, the station’s owner Pacifica Across America canceled all local programming and replaced it with shows from other stations due to “financial losses.” The closure came without warning, and station employees and volunteers vowed to take ...Read More

Stephen & Tabitha King have received city council approval to rezone their Bangor ME home as a non-profit, with plans to turn it into a museum. Stephen King’s personal archives, previously housed at the University of Maine, will be moved to the home and made available to scholars and other visitors by appointment. A house next door, also owned by the Kings, will accommodate up to five writers-in-residence at a ...Read More

LaShawn M. Wanak is the new editor of GigaNotoSaurus, taking over from Elora Gatts. As previously announced, Gatts had assumed the role in December of 2018.

Wanak is a book reviewer for Lightspeed and served as an associate editor at PodCastle from 2013 to 2015. She says,

I know it’s been a while since GigaNotoSaurus has published a new story. Therefore, I’ll be closing submissions this Friday, August 9, 2019, ...Read More

Jesmyn Ward will give this year’s annual Eudora Welty Lecture, celebrating “creative origins in the spirit of Welty’s treasured One Writer’s Beginnings.” The event is sponsored by the Eudora Welty Foundation and will be held October 16, 2019 at the Folger Theatre in Washington DC.

For more information, see the Folger website.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. ...Read More

In January 2019, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America announced that their mini­mum payment rate for professional short fiction markets (“the SFWA pro rate”) would increase to eight cents per word on September 1, 2019, and that rate has now gone into effect. Only stories sold at 8¢/word or above can qualify authors for membership in SFWA, though writers applying for membership qualify on the basis of the ...Read More

UC Santa Cruz has announced the lineup for its Fall 2019 Living Writers Series, to be held October 3 – December 5, 2019 at the Humanities Lecture Hall in Santa Cruz CA. This year’s theme is “Autobiography, Fairy Tales, The Future.” The “After Ursula” reading on November 14 will feature Karen Joy Fowler, Molly Gloss, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Nisi Shawl in conversation about Ursula K. Le Guin. Other series ...Read More

Audible, Amazon’s audiobook publishing arm, announced plans for “Audible Captions,” a fea­ture that displays the text of a book along with the narration on listener devices. Audible said the feature would be “available on hundreds of thousands of audiobooks at launch” – a decla­ration that was met with surprise and alarm by publishers who haven’t licensed the rights to publish such text to Audible. Publishing the text without permission would ...Read More

A number of immigrant and refu­gee authors published an open letter in The Na­tion calling on the US Congress to take “imme­diate steps to rectify the atrocious conditions for asylum seekers being detained” after attempting to enter the US. Isabel Allende, Lelsey Nneka Arimah, Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie, Gary Shteyngart, and Art Speigelman are among the 120+ signatories. The letter reads, in part:

Dear Members of the United States Con­gress: ...Read More

Applications are open for the 2019 Tiptree Fellowships until October 31, 2019. Each year, the Tiptree Motherboard awards $500 each to two emerging creators who “are doing work that is changing the way we think about gender through speculative narrative.”

For more information, or to apply, see the official website.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We ...Read More

Author Lavie Tidhar and game designer Jake Olefsky have launched an in­teractive SF story, “Svalvard”. Olefsky explains: “Essentially, you read a chapter, then solve a puzzle to unlock the next chapter. There are 23 short chapters in this non-linear short story. Did I mention it has robots and sentient fungi?” To read – and play – visit <www.puzzletales.com>.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with ...Read More

Cressida Cowell has been named the 2019-2021 Waterstones Children’s Laureate. “Selected by a panel made up of librarians, critics, writers, literature development workers and booksellers, the role is awarded to an outstanding children’s author or illustrator with a passion for fostering a new generation of writers, artists and readers.”

The Booker Prize has a new sponsor: charitable foundation Crankstart, created by venture capitalist Sir Michael Mortitz and his wife Hariett Heyman. They have agreed to sponsor the prestigious awards for five years, beginning in 2020. Crankstart takes over from the former sponsor, hedge fund Man Group, which has contributed £25 million to the prize since its sponsorship began in 2002, including £1.6 million for the 2019 prize.

The Booker ...Read More