SFERA, established in 1981, is the oldest genre award in the region and the most prestigious one in Croatia. It was founded by the Zagreb based science fiction society SFera, after which it was named. It’s just spelled differently. The idea was to try and popularize science fiction as a genre and to stimulate its production in Croatian.
It worked: since the beginning of the eighties, the SFERA Award grew in categories and in the number of people whose work was eligible. The juries and the chairs of the award have changed numerous times. There have been glorious moments, some fights, a couple of scandals and one outrage that will remain forever noted in the history of Croatian fandom because it created a second genre award – Artefakt. (Take heart, Anglophone fandom, shitstorms can make a fandom richer but that’s a whole different post!).
The winners are:
Short-short: Jurica Ranj „Korisnicka služba“, Parsek 123, SFera
Short story: Davor Šišovic, „Zavarivaci“, Anthology “Prsten s one strane sna”, Refestikon
Story: Zrinka Pavlic, „Sava ispod Sljemena“, Anthology “Imaš vatre?”, Jesenski i Turk
Novel: Tanja Tolic, „Zovem se nebo“, Ljevak
Children’s novel: Jelena Radan, „Zeda“, Algoritam
Theory: Slaven Škapul, „Imaginarij distopijskog filma!“, Ubiq 15, SFera
Special achievemnet: Astra, a pervasive LARP, Ivana Delac i Vesna Kurilic
The SFERA awards will be handed out on Saturday, May 16th at 20:00 at SFeraKon 2015.
