Aliette de Bodard has won both the Best Novel and Best Short Story British Science Fiction Association awards, becoming the first person to do so in the long history of the award, which was founded in 1969.

The critically-acclaimed author won the award for her novel The House of Shattered Wings and her short story Three Cups of Grief by Starlight. The presentation occurred at Eastercon this weekend. This year’s Eastercon, subtitled Mancunicon, was at the Hilton Hotel in Manchester.  

The House of Shattered Wings is set in a post-apocalyptic Paris and features fallen angels, complex magic and a Vietnamese immortal with a grudge. The Parisian author is no stranger to awards. She won the 2012 Nebula Award and Locus Award for Best Short Story for the short story Immersion. She won another Nebula Award for 2013’s The Waiting Stars. Her 2010 short story The Shipmaker won the 2010 British Science Fiction Award for Best Short Fiction. Despite this, De Bodard did not have a speech prepared and was surprised to have won.

Other winners of the British Science Fiction Association awards include critic and author Adam Roberts, who won the Best Non-Fiction award for his book Rave and Let Die: The SF and Fantasy of 2014. British sci-fi artist and living legend Jim Burns won Best Artwork for the cover of Ian Whate’s book Pelquin’s Comet. This will be the thirteenth time Burns has won a BFSA Award.

The awards ceremony also included the James White Award, which is a short story competition established in 2000. It offers non-professional writers the opportunity to have their work published in Interzone, a UK based Science Fiction anthology magazine that has only been around since 1982. The James White Award is judged by a panel of industry professionals. It was won by David Cleden for his story Rock Paper Incisors. The ceremony also announced that Hugo Award-winning academic Farah Mendlesohn would be handing over her role as BFSA Award admin to Claire Boothby.