Congratulations

Tasmanian writer Tansy Rayner Roberts has won the 2010 Washington Science Fiction Association Small Press Award for Siren Beat, a novella published by Western Australian small press Twelfth Planet Press and edited by Alisa Krasnostein.

I really enjoyed this novella (part of the Doubles series where it was partnered by Roadkill by Robert Shearman) when I read it last year. The books from this press get better and better, I think. The cover art is always intriguing and I love the variety in the books they put out. Small press has a valuable part to play, particularly in genre fiction, as a place where shorter fiction can be published apart from magazines. Collections, anthologies and novellas are unlikely to be published by mainstream publishers who are forced by commercial constraints to focus on uncontroversial novel length fiction but they definitely are worth the read.