The Paul Harland Prize 2012 culminated yesterday in the Paul Harland Day, an excellent afternoon of immersion in–and celebration of–all things genre. Contest and Day were organized again by the tireless and excellent Martijn Lindeboom, who deserves to be covered in praise, showered with gifts, and followed by groupies.
Highlight of the afternoon, of course, was the announcement of the winner of the Paul Harland Prize and assorted additional awards.
I had the honor of being “voorselecteur” (first-round judge and/or slush reader) for the Paul Harland Prize 2012 contest. I would love to rave about all the stories that impressed me, but for brevity’s sake, I’ll limit myself to the top-4:
- Paul Harland Prize 2012: Thomas Olde Heuvelt – De vis in de fles (“The fish in the bottle”), a delightfully absurd story of lost love in a world turned on end. For me, as I wrote last year on the Paul Harland Prize website, this was a single story so good it made wading through the 103-story Paul Harland Prize slush pile completely worth it. An English translation is doing the rounds, so hopefully the world will get a chance to read this excellent piece of fiction.
- 2nd place: Linda Mulders – Een seconde wijzer (which I think I’d translate as “On second hand”). Powerfully emotional, dealing convincingly and cleverly with time travel; to call Linda Mulders the Dutch Audrey Niffenegger would unfairly disregard her originality and strong voice. Here’s hoping a publisher will come to his senses and grab her before someone else does.
- 3rd place and NCSF Prize for highest-placing SF story: Jürgen Snoeren – Zoek mij tussen the sterren (“Find me among the stars”). With strong, convincing worldbuilding and complex personal and social interactions, this story is almost a novel condensed into a novelette. A very steampunky SF story, reminiscent of China Miéville.
- 4th place: Ben Adriaanse – De man die bananen kocht (“The man who bought bananas”). A rare gem, this: deadpan, absurdistic, entirely consistent, and outrageously funny. Defying genre labels, convention, and common sense, the story takes an absurd premise and follows that to its illogic extreme.
There were many more really good stories in the slush this time around, but for me these four define the very best Dutch speculative fiction currently has to offer. And while two names in this top-4 are very familiar (to me), the other two were completely new (to me), validating the objective of the PHP: to stimulate excellent genre writing in the Dutch language.