SF Canada member Sandra Kasturi is the winner of the 2018 Sunburst Award for Short Story. “The Beautiful Gears of Dying” appeared in Laksa Media’s The Sum of Us anthology.
The Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic has celebrated the best in Canadian fantastic literature in both Adult and Young Adult publications since 2001. Winners receive a medallion that incorporates the Sunburst logo. Winners of both the Adult and Young Adult Sunburst Award also receive a cash prize of $1,000, while winners of the Short Story Sunburst Award receive a cash prize of $500.
The Sunburst Jury commented:
In a strong field with many outstanding stories, Sandra Kasturi’s “The Beautiful Gears of Dying” did for the jury what speculative writing does best, by using a fantastic/technological trope to explore the complexity of human relations and the texture of human life. Kasturi’s story is linguistically complex, economical, emotionally intense, and yet accessible, and it provokes recurring thoughts about our human predicaments.
Sandra Kasturi is a poet, writer and editor, and the co-publisher of the World Fantasy and British Fantasy Award-winning press, ChiZine Publications. Born in Estonia to an Estonian mother and Sri Lankan father, she now lives in Canada. She is the co-founder (with Helen Marshall) of the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium and the national Chiaroscuro Reading Series. Sandra’s work has appeared in various venues, including ON SPEC, Prairie Fire, several Tesseracts anthologies, Evolve, Chilling Tales, A Verdant Green, TransVersions, ARC Magazine, Taddle Creek, Abyss & Apex, 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin, and Stamps, Vamps & Tramps. Her two poetry collections are: The Animal Bridegroom (with an intro by Neil Gaiman) and Come Late to the Love of Birds. She is currently working on two books: a new poetry collection called Snake Handling for Beginners, as well as a story collection, Mrs. Kong & Other Monsters.