The Speculative Literature Foundation (SLF) is delighted to announce that its third annual Older Writers Grant is to be awarded to Christopher Furst. The $500 grant will be used to help Mr. Furst in his professional writing career. The award is intended for writers of fifty years or older to assist such writers 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.
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 for a time. 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.”
The 2006 Older Writers Grant was generously sponsored by Centric Advertising (http://www.centric.com/) and ISFIC: Illinois Science Fiction in Chicago (http://isfic.org/).
Please direct any questions to Sandra Kasturi, Award Administrator, at olderwriters@speculativeliterature.org
