The SFERA Award jury was my entry into Croatian fandom. I spent more than a decade as president of it, and still love to keep track of who wins and who loses any given year. I think I might have missed only one SFera Formal Assembly on a SFeraKon Saturday in the last 15 years.
The SFERA Award is a juried award, established in 1981 and pissing off fans and writers alike ever since. Awarded by consensus, it is the first and eldest genre award in Croatia and also one with the highest percentage of female winners in all of Croatian literature.
SFERA consists of two plaques, one to take home and one to ritually glue to the base of what we call the Ashtray. This year that privilege belongs to:
- Ed Barol, for best flash story: Kopija (Greške u koracima, Pučko otvoreno učilište, Pazin, 2018)
- Igor Rendić, best short story: Screensaver (Transreali, SFera, Zagreb, 2018)
- Veronika Santo, best story: Uvijek nedjeljom (Ubiq, časopis za književnu fantastiku, broj 23, SFera, Zagreb 2018)
- Živko Prodanović, best poetry … from “empatija vječnosti” (Parsek, broj 136, SFera, Zagreb, 2018)
- Pavao Pavličić, best novel: Bakrene sove (Mozaik Knjiga d.o.o., Zagreb, 2018)
- Tatjana Peruško, best theory: U labirintu teorija : O fantastici i fantastičnom /in the labyrinth of theories : On fantasy and the fantastic (Hrvatska sveučilišna naklada, Zagreb 20168.)
- Davorin Horak, best colour illustration: cover for the Crotaian edition of the Adrian Tchaikovski novel Children of Time, Djeca vremena (Hangar 7, Zagreb, 2018)
- Antea Benzon, best young writer protosfera: Govorim istinu, (Sirius B broj 40, Hangar 7, Zagreb, 2018)
Previous winners can be found here (in Croatian).
