The winner of the 2017 Crawford Award, presented annually by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA) for a first book of fantasy fiction, is All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor). One judge cited the novel’s “humor, the light touch, the swiftness with which the narrative unspools.”

The Crawford shortlist includes:

Marginalia to Stone Bird, Rose Lemberg (Aqueduct); Maresi, Maria Turtschaninoff (Pushkin/Abrams); and Greener Pastures, Michael Wehunt (Shock Totem).

Participating at various stages of this year’s nomination and selection process were previous Crawford winners Jedediah Berry, Candas Jane Dorsey, and Daryl Gregory, as well as Karen Burnham, Niall Harrison, Ellen Klages, Farah Mendlesohn, Cheryl Morgan, Graham Sleight, and Liza Groen Trombi. The award will be presented on March 25, 2017 during the 38th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando FL.

Also at the conference, the IAFA’s Distinguished Scholarship Award will be presented to Edward James, and the Jamie Bishop Memorial Award for a work of scholarship written in a language other than English will go to David Dalton. The Walter James Miller Memorial Award, for a student paper on a work or works of the fantastic originally created in a language other than English, will be presented to Ida Yoshinaga. The winner of IAFA’s award for an outstanding student paper, formerly called the Graduate Student Award but rechristened last year as the David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award, is Grant Dempsey.

For more information, see the IAFA website.