Books / Literary Award
Virginia Bergin wins Tiptree Award
Bristol writer, Virginia Bergin, has won the US-based Tiptree Award for her young adult novel, Who Runs the World?
The international award is an annual literary prize for “science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender.” The award aims to “seek out work that is thought-provoking, imaginative, and perhaps even infuriating…and reward those writers and other creative artists who are bold enough to contemplate shifts and changes in gender roles.”
It is named after Alice B. Sheldon, who wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr.
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Virginia says of her triumph: “I’m overwhelmed! Who Runs the World? was such a struggle to write, so to have this recognition from the Tiptree Award is truly amazing. I feel grateful and delighted. It’s a huge honour and good news to be shared with the whole of the Bristol writing community, which seems to be thriving right now.”
She adds: “I suppose it might give me a bit more confidence. That would be good! I’m from a fairly working-class background and I grew up thinking, ‘People like me don’t become writers’. It has taken me a very long time to believe in myself, to believe that I could write – let alone to have the courage to tackle ‘big’ subjects.
“Maybe now I won’t feel quite so daunted and unsure . . . but maybe not; self-doubt seems like such an inevitable part of writing – the important thing, as I am forever telling people (including myself), is to just get on with it. I hope winning the Tiptree Award will make me get on with writing the next book.”
Who Runs the World? is Virginia’s third novel and is set sixty years after a virus appears to have wiped out almost all men.
As well as winning the Tiptree Award, it has been nominated for the 2018 CILIP Carnegie Medal, and shortlisted for the 2018 Wirral Book Award and Grampian Children’s Book Award.
Who Runs the World? is published by Pan Macmillan and is available in bookshops and online. www.panmacmillan.com/authors/virginia-bergin/who-runs-the-world
Read more: Helen Dunmore wins posthumous Costa Book of the Year Award
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