Winner -- World Fantasy Award!

I'm pleased -- ecstatic! -- to report that Fafnir: Nordic Journal of SFF Research has just won a World Fantasy Award.

Couldn't be happier about this achievement. For the last three years, I've been Fafnir's (inaugural) reviews editors, and in that time the journal has undergone several major improvements from an already solid foundation. Although neither my name nor Jaana's will go on the actual award**, it's been a team effort all-around, and I'm so incredibly proud of my colleagues. I'm also incredibly proud of all our authors, reviewers, and editorial board members for their immense contributions, which is the real reason the journal has achieved anything over the last six years.

This award is also an important coup for open-access publication. As far as we can tell, Fafnir is only the second academic journal to be nominated for a World Fantasy Award, and the first to win. Adding a special flavor to this achievement is that our sponsoring organization, the FINFAR society, is a fan-run organization in an up-and-coming area of the world, Finland, for SF&F research.

Here's a copy of our acceptance speech, read by co-editors Laura E. Goodin and Esko Suoranta. Jaana's name as well as my own are bolded.

We’re thrilled to be accepting this award, the first World Fantasy Award ever given to an academic journal, and we congratulate our fellow nominees. The award validates the importance of open-access speculative fiction scholarship as a rich contribution to the discourse about who we are as human beings and who we want to be.

Fafnir has been publishing for only six years, and it’s been the work of many talented people. We’d like to first mention the other two team members who make Fafnir possible. Dr. Dennis Wise, our reviews editor, MLA guru, and Swiss army knife of academic editors, has built Fafnir’s book-review section up from about three reviews per year to over 15, keeping scholars up to date on recent work in the field; worked to get Fafnir accepted into the Directory of Open-Access Journals; and initiated work on our style sheet, our recent journal redesign, and our newly liberalised copyright policy.

Our managing editor, Ms. Jaana Hakala, is similarly multitalented: she modestly characterizes her wizardry as “just wrapping whatever you give to me in as nice a package as I can with the tools I have”, but that entails typesetting, layout, document management, and website management for each issue, as well as serving as an abundant font of institutional memory. Dennis and Jaana’s skills and professionalism are crucial to producing a quality journal.

We’d like to thank all the other people who have made this very great honor possible: the board and members of our publishers, the Finnish Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy Research; our advisory board; the editors-in-chief who have served before us and built Fafnir from the ground up; the authors who send us their research; the peer reviewers who graciously donate their time and expertise to advance the field of speculative-fiction scholarship; our readers; the World Fantasy Award judges, the convention, and the broader speculative-fiction community.

[Finnish] Meillä on kunnia jatkaa työtämme osana tätä eloisaa yhteisöä ja olla mukana näyttämässä maailmalle, miten ajatella uusia ajatuksia, uneksia uusia unelmia ja rakentaa uusia tulevaisuuksia.

Vi är hedrade att fortsätta vårt arbete med denna livfulla gemenskap för att visa världen hur man tänker nya tankar, drömmer nya drömmar och bygger upp nya framtidsutsikter.

We are honored to continue our work with this vibrant community as we all show to the world how to think new thoughts, dream new dreams, and build new futures.

Kiitos, tack, thank you.

Again, congratulations to everyone who has helped Fafnir evolve over the last six years.

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** Laura Goodin, bless her heart, lobbied the WFC to gets our names added to the nomination, but no go; they claimed that they needed to keep the number of names on any nomination to a minimum.