ARIZONA AUTHOR TONY TAYLOR WINS 2016 ERIC HOFFER BOOK AWARDS

Sedona author and 2015 Arizona Book of the Year recipient Tony Taylor has been awarded two distinctions by the prestigious international 2016 Eric Hoffer Book Awards. Taylor’s novels, The Darkest Side of Saturn (2015) and Counters (2014), have won First Place for Commercial Fiction, and Honorable mention in the Legacy Fiction categories, respectively.

The Hoffer Award honors the memory of the great American philosopher Eric Hoffer by highlighting salient writing, as well as the independent spirit of small publishers. Since its inception, the Hoffer has become one of the largest international book awards for small academic and independent presses.

Both novels made the Short List—an honor in itself—for the Grand Prize.

Counters, a story of air combat informed by Taylor’s fighter pilot experiences in the Vietnam war, has been described as follows: “This book is destined to become a classic....It’s a searing question of survival....The author is an extraordinarily gifted writer, who claims to have navigated spacecraft to every planet in the solar system.”

The Darkest Side of Saturn, a story of two astronomers who discover a dangerous asteroid, has been described as “deftly juggling sly satire, romance, suspense, and metaphysics, the author, a former NASA navigator, offers fascinating insight into the procedures & politics of space exploration.”

Pilot, spacecraft navigator, author Tony Taylor flew fighters in the Air Force and later navigated NASA spacecraft to all eight planets of the solar system. For insurance, in order to claim all the planets in case Pluto is promoted again, he added Pluto in 2015 as a member of the New Horizons Navigation Team. Taylor lives with his wife, Jan, in Sedona, Arizona.

from Arizona Authors Association http://ift.tt/1TW9uJz
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