Plum Rains by Andromeda Romano-Lax wins 2019 Sunburst Award for Canadian speculative writing

Plum Rainsby B.C. writer Andromeda Romano-Lax has won the adult fiction category of the 2019 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic.

The Sunburst Awards annually give out two $1,000 prizes one to a work of adult fiction and one to a YA book as well as a $500 short story award.

• Calling all writers! The 2020 CBC Short Story Prize is now open for submissions

Romano-Lax's novel is set in 2029 Tokyo and tells the story of a secretive, elderly woman, her caretaker and an advanced robot designed to anticipate human needs. The Sunburst jury described it as a "masterpiece."

"The main characters' lives and relationships are steeped in, and grow from, a past which is both historical and personal, built on a century of colonialism and exploitation: social, sexual and economic," said the jury in a press release.

"This brilliant, character-driven novel examines individual reactions to threats to survival and autonomy."

• Explore the world of literary fantasy with these 6 books

Rachel Hartman won the YA category forTess of the Road,a novel about a young heroine who evades her family's plans to live at a nunnery by disguising herself as a boy and heading into the world alone.She ends up meeting an old friend, a dragon, who agrees to travel with her.

"Tess of the Road is a tour de force, a novel that dives headfirst into its heroine's complex, messy, morally multifaceted world while never losing sight of the story at its heart," said the jury in a press release.

• Why bestselling author Rachel Hartman used fantasy to tell the story of sexual assault

Senaa Ahmad received the short story award forThe Glow-in-the-Dark Girls,a horror tale about a group of girls who volunteer as walking bombs, burning cities to the ground.

"A cunning inversion of the real-life Radium Girls, factory workers who were gradually and grotesquely poisoned by the material they worked with, Ahmad's story turns the titular girls into weapons of mass destruction, objectified and vilified by the larger world even as they yearn for normalcy, grapple with their mortality and the consequences of their choices and set each other on fire," said the jury in a press release.

The 2019 Sunburst Award novel jury was comprised of Greg Bechtel, Susan Forest, Kari Maaren and Susan Reynolds. The short story prize was judged by S.M. Beiko, David Demchuk(who works at CBCas a public relations senior specialist) and Gemma Files.

Past winners of the prize include The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline, The Back of the Turtle by Thomas King and Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay.