South African author Imraan Coovadia has won second place in an international literary award in Russia.
Coovadia’s short story titled Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic scooped the international category Best Story in a Foreign Language accolade at the International Science Fiction Literary Awards: Future History.
The first place went to Colombian author Leonid Airio Mariño Murrillo for the story The Paradox of Jupiter, with the third place going to Italian writer Valter Tartaglia for The Awakening of Niila.
The international science fiction literary awards event was held at the Atom Museum in Moscow on November 6.
The director of the University of Cape Town’s Creative Writing Centre was one of 27 authors among 2,400 submissions received from authors around the world for the awards.
His short story was inspired by “psychological consequences” suffered by people in Nairobi, Kenya, and Johannesburg who had been hired to screen and classify disturbing content on Facebook.
The winner of the 2010 Sunday Times Literary Awards’ fiction category will see his short story being among those published on the leading digital platform LitRes, making it accessible to millions of readers.
A special collection was also being prepared for publication by Eksmo publishing house, which will be distributed to bookshops in Russia
The awards were established by the Atom Foundation with the support of Rosatom State Corporation and were created to discover talent whose work focuses on technological optimism and positive scenarios for the future, where science and progress serve to benefit humanity.
They were held under the theme “The world of the 22nd century and challenges for humanity”. The total prize fund exceeded 5m rubles (R1m), with each category winner getting a monetary prize.
TimesLIVE
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.