A big thank you to The Society of Authors for choosing this author for the Taner Baybars Award.

For various – don’t get me started – reasons, it has been a long time since my last book – and things have been pretty financially desperate for me, so I applied to the SoA for a ‘work in progress’ grant . . . and as a part of that application, I had to say what I was working on, and why.

This is information I would never usually share; I only tell a very few people what I’m writing because I’ve learned I’m best just left alone to get on with it.

The Taner Baybars Award is ‘for original fiction in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and magic realism (for both adult and children’s fiction)’.

I know so little about Taner Baybars (1936 – 2010). He was born in Cyprus, Turkish-speaking, moved to the UK as a young man, and was a poet, a translator (of Nâzım Hikmet) and a painter. An archive of his work is kept by the University of Reading.

I do not know how and why Taner Baybars’ legacy has come to support science fiction – though . . . it’s the job of science fiction to explore possible futures, and so see what light they shed on the realities of our now.

I am very grateful.