Four novels and a single-author collection of stories are finalists for the Endeavour Award.  The 2015 Award will be the sixteenth year for the Endeavour, which comes with an honorarium of $1,000.00.  The winner will be announced November 20, 2015, at OryCon, Oregon’s major science fiction convention.

The finalists are: Last Plane to Heaven by the late Portland, Ore. writer Jay Lake (Tor Books); Metatropolis by Saint Helens, Ore., writer Ken Scholes and Jay Lake (WordFire Press); Night Broken by Benton City, Wash. writer Patricia Briggs (Ace Books); Our Lady of the Islands by Portland, Ore. writer  Shannon Page and Jay Lake (Per Aspera Press); and The Shadow Throne by Bothell, Wash. writer Django Wexler (Roc Books.)

The Endeavour Award honors a distinguished science fiction or fantasy book, either a novel or a single-author collection, created by a writer living in the Pacific Northwest.  All entries are read and scored by seven readers randomly selected from a panel of preliminary readers.  The five highest scoring books then go to three judges, who are all professional writers or editors from outside of the Pacific Northwest.

JUDGES
The judges for the 2015 Award are Russell Davis, Esther Friesner, and Fran Wilde.

Russell Davis
Best-selling author and editor Russell Davis has written and sold numerous novels and short stories in virtually every genre of fiction, under at least a half-dozen pseudonyms. His writing has encompassed media tie-in work to original novels and short fiction in anthologies.  In addition to his work as a writer, he has worked as an editor and book packager, and created original anthology titles ranging from westerns like “Lost Trails” to fantasy like “Courts of the Fey.” Russell teaches popular genre fiction for the MFA program at Western State Colorado University. He was the president of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) from 2008–2010, and a member of the Western Writers of America (WWA). His newest collection, “The End of All Seasons,” came out in March, 2013, and he’s presently working on several new projects.

Esther Friesner
Nebula Award winner Esther Friesner is the author of over 40 novels and almost 200 short stories.  Educated at Vassar College and Yale University, where she received a Ph.D., she is also a poet, a playwright, and the editor of several anthologies.  The best known of these is the “Chicks in Chainmail” series that she created and edits for Baen Books.  The sixth book, “Chicks and Balances,” appeared in July 2015.  “Deception’s Pawn,” the latest title in her popular “Princesses of Myth” series of Young Adult novels from Random House, was published in April 2015.  Esther is married, a mother of two, grandmother of one, harbors cats, and lives in Connecticut.

Fran Wilde
Fran Wilde’s first novel, “Updraft,” is forthcoming from Tor/Macmillan in September 2015.  Her short stories have appeared in publications including Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nature, and Tor.com. Her interview series Cooking the Books about the intersection between food and fiction has appeared at Strange Horizons, Tor.com, and on her blog, franwilde.wordpress.com. She has taught writing and digital media at two colleges, a high school for the creative arts, and a long-distance program for young writers.

AWARD ELIGIBILITY FOR 2016
To be eligible for next year’s Endeavour Award the book — either a novel or a single-author collection of stories — must be either science fiction or fantasy.  The majority of the book must have been written, and the book accepted for publication, while the author was living in the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Alaska, British Columbia, or the Yukon.)  The deadline to enter books published during 2015 is February 15, 2016. Full information on entering the Award is available on the Endeavour Web site: www.osfci.org/endeavour.

The Endeavour Award is sponsored by Oregon Science Fiction Conventions, Inc. (OSFCI), a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation.