For Immediate Release
|
|
Robert J. Sawyer has just received the Toronto Public Library Celebrates Reading Award, one of Canada's top book-related honors. The award, which includes a cash prize of $2,500 and a crystal sculpture, was presented in front of a sold-out audience of 640 at the second annual Book Lover's Ball, a gala, $350-a-plate black-tie event held at Toronto's Liberty Grand on Thursday, February 15, 2007. The Toronto Public Library is the largest and busiest library system in North America, and the second largest in the world.
Says Sawyer: "Science fiction still struggles in some places for respectability, but that's never been the case in Toronto. The Toronto Public Library is known world-wide for its support of the genre." The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy, one of TPL's special collections, has the largest SF holdings of any public library in the world, and Sawyer was writer-in-residence there in 2003.
"If someone who writes about the future might be termed a prophet," adds Sawyer, "then the old adage about a prophet not being honored in his own country is false, at least here."
Margaret Atwood joined the proceedings from the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo via LongPen — the remote-controlled autographing and video-conferencing device she helped invent. Atwood was last year's winner of the TPL Celebrates Reading Award and, by way of passing the torch, she used the LongPen to autograph a copy of her latest novel to Sawyer.
A table full of representatives from Tor Books, Sawyer's New
York publisher, and H.B. Fenn and Company, Tor's Canadian
distributor, were on hand at the Book Lover's Ball to cheer
Sawyer's award. Sawyer's seventeenth novel, Rollback, comes out in April 2007.
]
[ What's RSS? ]
[ Subscribe to email group ]
[ Email Pressbook Editor ]
Except where otherwise noted, content and design
copyright © 1995–2008 by Science Fiction and
Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. ("SFWA").
Any opinions expressed
on the SFWA® site are those of the author, not of the SFWA® organization.
SFWA® and Nebula Awards® are registered trademarks
of
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc.
1958 visitors have been here
since the counter was last reset.