News from The Sunburst Award Society:

The Sunburst Award Society is pleased to announce the winners of the fourth annual Copper Cylinder Award.

The Copper Cylinder Award is an annual members’ choice award for Canadian literature of the fantastic, selected by members of the Sunburst Award Society for books published during the previous year. It derives its name from what is considered the first Canadian scientific romance, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, by James De Mille (1833-1880).

All winners of the Copper Cylinder will receive a unique, handcrafted copper cylinder trophy.

Adult Award

The winner of the 2015 Copper Cylinder Adult Award is The Back of the Turtle by Thomas King (HarperCollins Publishers, 2014).

From the publisher:

Gabriel returns to Smoke River, the reserve where his mother grew up and to which she returned with Gabriel’s sister. The reserve is deserted after an environmental disaster killed the population, including Gabriel’s family, and the wildlife. Gabriel, a brilliant scientist working for Domidion, created GreenSweep, and indirectly led to the crisis. Now he has come to see the damage and to kill himself in the sea. But as he prepares to let the water take him, he sees a young girl in the waves. Plunging in, he saves her, and soon is saving others. Who are these people with their long black hair and almond eyes who have fallen from the sky? Filled with brilliant characters, trademark wit, wordplay and a thorough knowledge of native myth and story-telling, this novel is a masterpiece by one of our most important writers.

Thomas King is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, scriptwriter and photographer of Cherokee and Greek descent. His acclaimed, bestselling fiction includes Medicine River; Truth and Bright Water; One Good Story, That One; Green Grass, Running Water; and A Short History of Indians in Canada. A member of the Order of Canada and the recipient of an award from the National Aboriginal Foundation, Thomas King is a professor of English at the University of Guelph, Ontario.

Young Adult Award

The winner of the 2015 Copper Cylinder Young Adult Award is The Door in the Mountain by Caitlin Sweet (ChiZine Publications, 2014).

From the publisher:

Lost in time, shrouded in dark myths of blood and magic, The Door in the Mountain leads to the world of ancient Crete: a place where a beautiful, bitter young princess named Ariadne schemes to imprison her godmarked half-brother deep in the heart of a mountain maze, where a boy named Icarus tries, and fails, to fly—and where a slave girl changes the paths of all their lives forever.

Caitlin Sweet works for the Ontario government and the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. She is the author of A Telling of Stars (Penguin, 2003) and its prequel, The Silences of Home (Penguin, 2005.) Her third novel, The Pattern Scars (ChiZine, 2011) was short-listed for the 2012 Sunburst Award, and won the 2012 CBC Bookie for Speculative Fiction.

The Sunburst Award Society also confers annually the juried Sunburst Awards for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Both awards celebrate the best in Canadian fantastic literature published during the previous calendar year.

For additional information about the Copper Cylinder Awards, Sunburst Award Society membership, and the voting process, please visit the website at http://coppercylinderaward.ca

For additional information about the Sunburst Awards, the nominees and jurors, eligibility, and the selection process, please visit the website at http://sunburstaward.org.