Five-time Aurealis Award-winning author and fairy tale-telling extraordinaire Kate Forsyth has been honoured by the American Library Association, taking out the Best Historical Novel award for her 2014 release Bitter Greens.

Forsyth joined international bestseller Lauren Beukes on the ALA’s 2015 reading list, beating out novels from Amy Belding Brown, Nicola Griffith, James Lee Burke and Ariel Lawhon in the same category.

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The Thiel Grant for Online Writing supports inventive writing for the internet. Recipients of the $5000 award commit to producing 50 posts on an agreed concept over a 12-month period. Australian online writers of all genres are encouraged to apply. Applications for the inaugural grant are open until the 28th of February, 2015.

Thanks to a generous bequest from legendary Australian film critic John Hinde, the AWG presents the John Hinde Awards for Science Fiction to both a produced and unproduced script to encourage, reward and foster creativity in the development and showcasing of exceptional science fiction writing for feature film, short film, television, radio and interactive media.

Critically acclaimed as an entrancingly strange time-travel saga, Predestination, written by Queensland’s Spierig Brothers Michael and Peter Spierig, claimed the $10,000 cash prize for the Produced category.  Predestination centres on a Temporal Agent (Ethan Hawke) who, on his final time-travelling assignment, must stop The Fizzle Bomber, the one criminal that has always managed to elude him, from killing 10,000 New Yorkers.

Min Min written by South Australian screenwriter, Simon Butters, was selected the inaugural winner of the Unproduced category.  Min Min is a story of four carefree travellers who speed across the Nullabor Plain to find the perfect surf break but their night time journey is cut terrifyingly short when they are hunted by a strange, deadly light in the sky – the Min Min.

As winner of the Unproduced category, Simon Butters was a special guest of the Fantastic Planet Sci-Fi Festival and will have the opportunity to meet with and have his script read by a number of experienced genre producers.

The entries to this year’s John Hinde Awards were of exceptional calibre and the judges for the Awards wrestled with their final decision.  The Guild would therefore like to attribute special recognition to Hugh Sullivan’s The Infinite Man, a comedy-romance about a man whose attempts to construct the ultimate romantic weekend backfire when he traps his lover in an infinite loop.

Commendations also go to the Shortlist for the Unproduced category who are now inducted into the AWG’s Pathways Program. Pathways has been developed to showcase the writers of scripts which display high potential for production to the broader industry. Both the Shortlist and the Longlist for the Unproduced category can be found below.

The winners of the 2014 John Hinde Awards was officially announced at the Fantastic Planet Sci-Fi Film Festival on Sunday 30 November 2014 at the Festival’s Awards Ceremony on its closing night. The Fantastic Planet Sci-Fi Film Festival screened simultaneously with the annual A Night of Horror Film Festival in a film festival face-off at the Newtown Dendy Cinemas in Sydney.

2014 Shortlist

The Shortlist for the 2014 John Hinde Award for the Unproduced category includes:

• Seeds by Annaliese Ciel Walker
  • Echovault by Jacques Joubert
  • Crossover (Schrodingers Cat) by Andrew Muir
  • Punishment by Les Zigomanis

2014 Longlist

The Longlist for the 2014 John Hinde Award for the Unproduced category includes:

• The Colony by Akos Armont
  • Robot by Helen Carmody
  • Big Turkey by Simon Dodd and Bruce Griffiths
  • Steam Ranger by David Haddin
  • Payload by Stuart Willis