Press Release #17
SPECULATIVE LITERATURE FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES OLDER WRITER'S GRANT WINNER
SPECULATIVE LITERATURE FOUNDATION
PO Box 1693, Dubuque, IA 52004-1693
info@speculativeliterature.org - http://www.speculativeliterature.org/
For Immediate Release: September 24, 2007
SPECULATIVE LITERATURE FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES OLDER WRITER'S GRANT WINNER
The Speculative Literature Foundation's Older Writer's Grant has been won by Christopher Furst.
Christopher Furst grew up in the San Fernando Valley , where his father worked on the space program. After studying Russian at USC he traveled in South America before settling in Austin, Texas .
He returned to Los Angeles and worked at UCLA before moving to New York where he taught Russian literature and detective fiction, “although not at the same time.”
He has since worked as a reporter and editor before attending the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle in 2005.
He is currently working on a novel, The Palace of Oblivion, set in the last days of Romania ’s Communist dictatorship.
Grant co-ordinator Colin Harvey said of Furst’s entry, The Last Great Clown Hunt, “This was a story whose quality leapt off the very first page; Narrator Jack Wilson and his stone-faced tracker Keaton are fully realized characters, worthy of any epic, but as importantly, it had a great idea, that of a slipstream world where slapstick humour has been outlawed and hunted to near-extinction. At the same time as it carried its central conceit to its ultimate limit, Furst turned the comedy to tragedy – both are after all, two sides of the same coin."
Furst wins a grant of US$500 to assist writers who are fifty years of age or older at the time of grant application, and who are just starting to work at a professional level.
Honorable mentions go to Bruce Golden and Philip J. Lees for the quality of their very different submissions, and who made choosing an eventual winner such a difficult task.
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PR Contact: Ashley Gronek press@speculativeliterature.org
The Speculative Literature Foundation is a volunteer-run, non-profit
organization dedicated to promoting the interests of readers, writers,
editors and publishers in the speculative literature community.
"Speculative literature" is a catch-all term meant to inclusively span the
breadth of fantastic literature, encompassing literature ranging from hard
and soft science fiction to epic fantasy to ghost stories to folk and fairy
tales to slipstream to magical realism to modern mythmaking -- any
literature containing a fabulist or speculative element.
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