Lauren Beukes and the Arthur C Clarke Award Win: All the Links
It’s been a happy Easter for Lauren Beukes – On Tuesday she won the prestigious Arthur C Clarke award for her novel Zoo City, which is set in an alternate Johannesburg. Not forgetting Freedom Day, Beukes paid tribute to South Africa in her acceptance speech, “It’s a really special day because it’s the 17th anniversary of democratic South Africa today…I think South Africa is an incredible place to live, it’s an incredible place to write about – it’s really where science fiction is.” (continue reading at TimesLive).
Below are some of the photos from the awards ceremony. Also visit the Arthur C Clarke Award’s Facebook page for more photos and new videos that they’ve just posted.
Lauren clutching her prize and photographed with China Mieville, last year’s winner, and Lauren sharing some 2-toed sloth-action with author Jon Courtenay Grimwood, one of the judges on the award panel. Lauren later tweeted that the red wine stains down the front of her dress were #totallypartofmylook:
Yes, those are red wine stains down the front of my dress in the Clarke Award photos #totallypartofmylookless than a minute ago via Twitterrific 
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Lauren Beukes
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Her win is receiving much press attention, as Beukes stands out first as a female writer in a genre otherwise dominated by men, and secondly, for showcasing science fiction writing in the developing world. Zoo City was the “clear winner” according to judge and author Jon Courtenay Grimwood.
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Update 06 May 11
The Mail & Guardian did not stinge in its coverage of Beukes and her win, even going so far as to put her on the cover of this week’s edition. Here follow no fewer than three articles related to the author/Zoo City:
Science fiction’s Very Big Deal
Please tell me a bit about the award, and what it means to you. “Nominated for/winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award” is one of those phrases that was splashed across books I read growing up. Do you have a similar “relationship” with the award? Was it an aspiration?
I grew up with those too! And books boasting “Hugo” and “Nebula” award-winning. It did seem like something pretty special that I dreamed about as a kid (together with getting Dragonlance artist Larry Elmore to do my first book cover!)
More recently I think I’ve been too absorbed about the business of being a writer to think about it and when the nomination came in, it seemed unreal and maybe enough in itself, to be on THAT short-list.
Winning was a huge shock. I think that’s apparent in the YouTube video. I’m still coming down, still trying to compute it. It’s overwhelming and humbling to get that kind of international recognition. Being ranked among some of my favourite writers including Margaret Atwood and China Miéville and Kazuo Ishiguro and Geoff Ryman — writers I grew up reading, writers I read now? Mad. Wonderful.
I’m happy and delirious and, most of all, grateful — it’s like a physical pang.
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Modest prize for prestigious writing award
The award’s first winner was Margaret Atwood and the list of winners is fairly evenly divided between men and women. Asked about perceptions that women sci-fi and fantasy writers are rare, Beukes said: “I get held up a lot as an example of that apparently rare specimen of ‘female science-fiction writer’, which is a little irritating. I don’t like being neatly categorised, labelled and filed away in a cabinet of curiosities.
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Behind all the monkey business
Stories about the developing world are fast becoming flavour of the month for speculative fiction but it has been 14 years since a writer from a developing country won any of the genre’s prizes.
In 1997, it was Amitav Ghosh, winning the Arthur C Clarke Award for The Calcutta Chromosome.
Last week, it was Jo’burg-born, Cape Town-resident Lauren Beukes winning the same prize for Zoo City (Jacana) — a first for Africa and South Africa.
Genre definitions and boundaries are becoming increasingly contentious in the field — the Guardian’s report of Beukes’s prize was followed by an extended, three-handed, online debate about whether the work was “really” science fiction. It’s a debate for which Beukes has little patience.
MEANWHILE, the UK’s Guardian says that Beukes deserved the win…
The book, too, is witty and bold. Beukes was wearing a mock sloth because her lead character, Zizi, is accompanied by one at all times. In a dark twist on Philip Pullman’s daemons – anyone who commits a crime has to wear “a spirit critter”. These animals naturally mark their wearers out as undesirables and they are forced to live in the Zoo City, an underworld slum. Zizi writes scam letters to cover her debts and also earns extra cash from her talent at finding things – a talent that soon lands her in the midst of an investigation to track down a creepy teen singer that has so many shadows and pools of darkness that it reminded me of no less a talent than the hard man of hard-boiled, Ross MacDonald.
…and Beukes recorded a podcast with Escape Pod, the “Science Fiction Podcast Magazine”. Listen:
- Not playing? Listen at Escape Pod
Last, Beukes interacted with a group of budding journos in Cape Town this week; here’s how they covered her visit:
Friday’s guest, Lauren Beukes; mother, journalist, TV scriptwriter, author of Maverick, Moxyland and Zoo City (which has been shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke award) came in for a chat. She let us in on her narrative journalism and advised us on how to become better by nurturing the contacts we make and writing every day to develop skills.
She spoke about how important it was to always be open to criticism because that is how to learn.
“It’s gonna feel deeply personal but it’s not”.
She emphasised that the most important currency to have as a journalist is ideas.
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Update 03 May 11
Beukes gave an interview to “we come from the future” website io9, and also posted her thoughts on the win via her BOOK SA blog. Read it up!
Congrats on winning the award! What does this win mean to you, both in terms of your career and in terms of your writing?
It’s all rather overwhelming. Mostly I feel grateful – and I know everyone says that, but it’s actually a deep physical pang, a bit like heartache, only happier. I owe so much to so many people. I’m still in shock. The international recognition of the win, especially with THAT short-list, is amazing, the physical object is beautiful, but it’s been the response from people that’s affected me the most. (Although my favourite response has been from my friend, Tom Eaton, who runs satire site Hayibo.com, offering congratulations on winning the Arthur C Clarke and commiserations on storing a three year old corpse of a dead writer in my living room – which made me laugh out loud).
On Gratitude (A Long List of Thank Yous And How It Feels)
I arrived back in South Africa yesterday, bearing the Clarke Award, Joey Hi-Fi’s BSFA Award for Best Artist for the Zoo City cover and, most importantly, a prowl of plastic dinosaurs for my two year old daughter who doesn’t care about either and wants to climb on my head while I am trying to do email interviews. It’s wonderfully grounding.
The question I get asked most is how does it feel. The answer is strange. Overwhelming. I think my hands shook for half an hour afterwards. Riding the tube the next day to meet up with writer friends old and new for a casual lunch planned weeks before, I’d be thinking about mundane things only to be interrupted by bright flashes of happy disbelief. “Okay, so probably best to get off at Highbury Islington and walk up from there – HOLY CRAP I WON THE ARTHUR C CLARKE AWARD – Or maybe Angel. Only one stop away. Yeah, definitely Angel.”
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Award director Tom Hunter said, “This is a great book that promises to inspire both long term fans of the genre and introduce a whole new readership to the best of science fiction literature”:
Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City has been honoured with the Arthur C Clarke Award for science fiction novel of the year, being tipped to bring “a whole new readership” to the genre. Zoo City’s publisher Angry Robot Books has also been hailed as one of the most “innovative and exciting” genre publishers in the country following the announcement.
The Guardian also reports on Beukes’ win, pointing out that she is the ninth woman to win the prize ever since Margaret Atwood won it 25 years ago. Beukes says that South Africa is the “place to be” when it comes to sci-fi writing, “It’s really where science fiction is. It’s in the developing world, it’s first world, it’s third world – the way we use technology is different to the way it’s used elsewhere. This book is about magic and technology and it’s very special to be here”.
South African author Lauren Beukes has won the UK’s top science fiction prize, the Arthur C Clarke award, seeing off the favourite, Ian McDonald, with a story of the criminal underclass in an alternate Johannesburg.
Published by the tiny UK press Angry Robot, Zoo City beat not only McDonald, but also the US National Book award winner Richard Powers and the Guardian children’s fiction prize winner Patrick Ness.
Speaking after the “unexpected” result, Beukes said she felt “like Gwyneth Paltrow – but I promise I won’t burst into tears”.
Beukes will also be featured in an exhibition at the British Library focusing on the works of writers and artists throughout history who have sought to discover the possibilities of “other worlds” via the sci-fi genre:
This new exhibition will invite visitors to enter the world of the future, alien worlds, parallel worlds and virtual worlds, and speculate on how our universe might change. These imaginings can provoke hopes and dreams, exhilaration or fear – and shed light on the time and place in which they were created. We hope to encourage visitors’ questions such as: ‘Is there such a thing as a perfect world?’ ‘When and how will the world end?’
Tor.com and Charles Christian also congratulated Beukes on her win and Jonathan Wright from The Independent says that works like Zoo City show that “the future won’t happen in London, New York or Tokyo”. Rather, it is in the developing world where writers are turning the sci-fi genre on its head:
The future won’t happen in London, New York or Tokyo; it will happen in Mumbai, Rio and Lagos. Next Wednesday at the Sci-Fi London Film Festival, the Arthur C. Clarke Award marking the best science-fiction novel of the year will be handed out for the 25th time, with previous winners including Margaret Atwood and Amitav Ghosh.
Of the six novels shortlisted, two take place in contingent, hyperlinked cities that teeter between vibrantly alive and scarily chaotic: Istanbul in British author Ian McDonald’s Dervish House; and Johannesburg in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City.
Elsewhere, on the shortlist for the British Science Fiction Association Award, due to be doled out this weekend, both books are joined by American Paolo Bacigalupi’s hugely praised Hugo and his Nebula winner The Windup Girl, set in 23rd-century Bangkok where Earth has been denuded by climate change and bio-engineered plagues.
Beukes also wrote about the research that went into writing Zoo City at The World SF Blog, and the sensitive topic of “Writing the Other”.
Writing The Other is a sensitive topic. It should be. Not least because it’s so often been done so very, very, badly.
But the truth is that unless you’re writing autobiography, any character you write is going to be The Other.
I am not a serial killer. (Unless my multiple personalities are hiding something from me.) I am also not a 50s housewife, a parking attendant, a car-jacking reality TV star, a Ugandan email scammer, a Tokyo mecha pilot, or a future-world stubborn-as-heck gay anti-corporate activist. And even though my novelist friends Thando Mgqolozana and Zukiswa Wanner like to joke that I’m a black girl trapped in a white girl’s skin, I’m not Zoo City’s hip, fast-talking, ex-journo, ex-junkie black Joburg girl protagonist, Zinzi.
I don’t have a lot of patience for authors who say they’d be too scared to write a character outside their cultural experience. Because we do that all the time. It’s called using your imagination.
The other people I don’t have a lot of patience for are the ones too lazy to do any research. I heard a radio interview recently with a poet who had written a whole book of verse about the sex workers in Amsterdam’s red light district and the incredible empathy she had for these women and how she tried to climb inside their heads to really expose the painful reality of their experiences.
Number of sex workers she interviewed or even tried to engage in a casual chat to get that in-depth insight into the painful reality of their experiences?
Zero.
Update 15 June 11
A bevy of new-ish links related to Lauren’s win:
Top SA author’s no sloth…
Lauren Beukes has written an animated teen TV show, campaigned against crime, collects gargoyles and wears a pink wedding ring with skulls and venus flytraps.
Now the Cape Town mother is the country’s latest literary sensation. Her novel Zoo Cityscooped Britain’s top science-fiction award last week and has sold out in that country, while 30000 copies have been dispatched to shop shelves worldwide.
Beukes said the impact of her Arthur C Clarke Award – in which she beat bestselling writers Ian McDonald and Patrick Ness – was “massive”.
Zoo City is a murder mystery set in an alternative-reality slum in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, where criminals can be identified by the animals that follow them.
The cover designer, Joey Hi-Fi, aka Dale Halvorsen, won the best art prize at the British Science Fiction Awards a week before Beukes’s achievement.
Beukes received the award at the Apollo Cinema in Piccadilly Circus, London, on Freedom Day, April 27. She praised her “incredible” country and wore a fake sloth creature on her shoulders – like her main character, Zinzi December.
Her UK publisher, Marc Gascoigne, said a second reprint of 5000 copies was ordered in Britain this week. About 16000 copies were sent to US bookstores. The book is being translated into French, Russian and other languages.
- Complete article: Times LIVE (Google cache)
UCT graduate picks up marquee sci-fi award
Alumna Lauren Beukes made literary history when she became the first South African to win the Arthur C Clarke Award, considered the most coveted honour for science fiction writing published in the UK.
Beukes bagged the award and the £2 011 purse for her second novel, Zoo City, released in 2010. She was something of a dark horse and beat out hot favourite Ian McDonald whose The Dervish House trumped Zoo City for the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) best novel award only days before, and the likes of Richard Powers, winner of the US National Book Award, and Patrick Ness, winner of the Guardian children’s fiction prize.
The stars of modern SF pick the best science fiction
Lauren Beukes
Watchmen by Alan Moore (1986-7)It took me years to read Watchmen. Every time I’d get to the men in tights and the giant naked blue guy, I’d think, “Ack! Superhero comic!” and put it down again. It wasn’t that I was against comics. I’d read 2000AD Monthly religiously since 1989 and Alan Moore’s The Ballad of Halo Jones, about a girl from an interplanetary ghetto who wanted to get “out”, was my favourite series of all. But I liked the dark, twisty stuff that had something to say about the world and superhero comics seemed tediously codified with no room for moral ambiguity. I should have known better. What Moore does best, even at his silliest or most obtusely philosophical, is subvert. He uses story to crack open the dark places of the human soul like a crab shell, revealing the pasty meat within, and then pokes it with a cattleprod to see it writhe.
Getting to know you… #3
Name: Lauren Beukes
Claim to Fame: Author of Arthur C Clarke Award-winning novel, Zoo City and Moxyland, TV scriptwriter, Twitter fiend and occasional journalist.
Favourite restaurant? Addis in Cape: amazing Ethiopian food over three floors and honey wine. (+27 21 424 5722)
Favourite getaway spot? The grey and rockstar pink windowseat my husband had built into the bay window of our bedroom, overlooking Table Mountain, immersed in a book. Ideally with my two year old daughter tucked under my arm reading her own book.
Links from the Jacana Media blog
Book details
- Zoo City by Lauren Beukes (SA edition)
EAN: 9781770098183
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- Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
EAN: 9780857660558 (US edition)
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- Zoo City by Lauren Beukes (eBook – PDF)
EAN: 9781431400454
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- Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
EAN: 9780857660541 (UK edition)
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- Zoo City by Lauren Beukes (US paperback edition)
EAN: 9780007327683
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Photos courtesy SFX
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