Friday, May 08, 2015

Arthur C Clarke award goes to 'elegy for the hyper-globalised present'

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel, which follows a troupe of actors across a devastated America, praised by judges for transcending the post-apocalypse genre

Emily St John Mandel.
‘If you write literary fiction that’s set partly in the future, you’re apparently a sci-fi writer’ ... Emily St John Mandel. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
Station Eleven, Emily St John Mandel’s haunting tale of a global pandemic that wipes out civilisation, has won this year’s Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction.

The novel interweaves a story set in Year Twenty after the “Georgia Flu” has killed almost all humanity with flashbacks to the final days of civilisation. By focusing on a troupe of travelling actors and musicians bringing Shakespeare to America’s isolated survivors in the aftermath of disaster, Mandel explores the power of memory and the human need for art and culture.

Chair of the judges, Andrew M Butler, said: “While many post-apocalypse novels focus on the survival of humanity, Station Eleven focuses instead on the survival of our culture, with the novel becoming an elegy for the hyper-globalised present.”
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