Champagne and Socks

Before I move on, I wanted to dig a bit deeper into the stats I presented last time on the Aurealis Awards novels categories.

In my last post, I compared the gender of shortlisted authors and the winners in each of the Aurealis novel categories and then compared those to the gender breakdown of the Ditmar novel category. I wanted to look at that a bit more closely. Here is the breakdown in Ditmar novel winners by whether they won, shortlisted or were overlooked in the Aurealis Awards novel categories.

The Ditmars are often seen as a “correcting force” for the Aurealis Awards. 6% of the time, or once, a novel won the Ditmar which did not make the Aurealis Awards shortlists. That novel was The Scarlet Rider by Lucy Sussex. It is recognised in the subsequent charts as N/A for Aurealis Award category.

This chart breaks down the Ditmars novel winners into genre using their shortlisted categories in the Aurealis Awards (for the length of the Aurealis Awards, only). 50% of the time, a SF novel wins the Ditmar. Last year was the first time that SF novel was written by a woman – Kim Westwood’s The Courier’s New Bicycle.

61% of the time, the Ditmar novel goes to a novel that only shortlisted, but did not win an Aurealis Award. Those winners are broken down below into genre category.

The other aspect I wanted to drill down into was the Fantasy novel category. It was remarked to me after I posted the last statistics that it’s interesting because it’s not a new thing for this category to be a strong female – dare I write “dominated” – category. It’s essentially the trend for this award.

Tallying up the winners for this category, where each nomination is a separate novel,  a couple stand out:

Juliet Marillier – 3 wins, 8 nominations

Sara Douglass – 2 wins, 10 nominations

Sean Williams – 2 wins, 3 nominations

Garth Nix – 2 wins, 3 nominations

Jane Routley – 2 wins, 2 nominations