Withdrawing TQF from the British Fantasy Awards

We were delighted to be on the shortlist of the British Fantasy Award for Best Magazine/Periodical this year, and I'm impossibly grateful to every one of the silly, lovely people who voted for the magazine in the first and second rounds of voting.

But as the administrator of those awards I only left it in because (a) I assumed it wouldn't get any votes and (b) a constitutional glitch meant that I couldn't ignore the votes that did come in. That glitch was all sorted out at the AGM of the British Fantasy Society – and now BFS members know why I wanted to fix it!

The winner of the award for best magazine was Murky Depths.

The BFS is now taking recommendations for next year's awards, and I've decided to withdraw Theaker's Quarterly Fiction from the Best Magazine/Periodical award for as long as I'm the awards administrator, or as long as I'm the editor of the magazine – whichever tenure comes to an end first. (Individual contributions will still be eligible, in the same way that stories from BFS publications are.)

That's partly because I'd have been profoundly embarrassed to win the award over a shortlist that included for example Black Static and Interzone, magazines to whom, for all our good qualities, we can't hold a candle. But also because a win for us in that category would have cast not just my integrity into doubt, but the integrity of the entire awards.

Of course, now I can sit back every year and say, we'd have won that. So in a sense, by withdrawing, I get to win every year... ;-)