Electric Lit relies on contributions from our readers to help make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. Please support our work by becoming a member today, or making a one-time donation here .

Usually when I'm obsessively checking the internet to see if I won an award, it doesn't go this way. — @emilymandel

Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven has just won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award, one of science fiction’s most prestigious awards. Mandel’s best-selling post-apocalyptic novel about a traveling theater company performing Shakespeare after a plague destroys most of humanity has been praised by both literary and genre critics and readers. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, but — as Mandel’s above tweet suggests — this is the first major prize the book has won. (You can read our review of Station Eleven here.)