Ottawa-born sci-fi author earns lifetime award
Sole Canadian to win world’s top three honours
For the first time in 30 years — and only the fourth time ever — the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association is bestowing a Lifetime Achievement award, and the recipient is Ottawa-born author Robert J. Sawyer.
Sawyer is to get his award in Ottawa on Oct. 6. He is one of only eight writers — and the only Canadian — to win all three of the world’s top awards for best sciencefiction novel of the year:
The World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Award, which Sawyer won in 2003 for his novel Hominids;
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award, which he won in 1996 for his novel The Terminal Experiment;
The John W. Campbell Memorial Award, given by the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at Kansas University, which he won in 2006 for Mindscan.
He’s also won 13 Prix Aurora Awards, given by the CSFFA, more than anyone else.
He has also won awards from around the world, including Japan, Spain and France.
The CSFFA says Sawyer is being honoured not just for his writing, but also his decades of support for other writers. David G. Hartwell, senior editor at Tor Books in New York, was quoted in Publishers Weekly as saying, “Sawyer is very generous to young writers.”
The publishing trade journal Quill & Quire called him a generous mentor, in naming Sawyer one of the “30 most influential, innovative and just plain powerful people in Canadian publishing.”
Sawyer was born in Ottawa in 1960. He has taught sciencefiction writing at the University of Toronto, Ryerson University, Humber College and the Banff Centre. And he has been writer-in-residence at Berton House in Dawson City; the Toronto Public Library’s Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy; the Richmond Hill Public Library; the Kitchener Public Library; and the Canadian Light Source, Canada’s national synchrotron facility, in a position created for him.
His latest novel is Red Planet Blues (Penguin Canada). The 2009 ABC-TV series FlashForward was based on his novel of the same name.
The Prix Aurora Awards were founded in 1980. Authors previously given lifetime achievement awards are A.E. van Vogt in 1980, Phyllis Gotlieb in 1982 and Judith Merril in 1983. At 53, Sawyer is the youngest author ever to receive a lifetime-achievement Aurora.
The award will be given during Can-Con 2013, this year’s Canadian National Science Fiction Convention, which is taking place in Ottawa.