Dracula-related awards

In August 2014, after a joint trip to the Borgo Pass, Daniela Diaconescu, co-founder and vice-president of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula (the presidency had remained vacant since the death of Nicolae Paduraru in 2007), handed me the society's prestigious Research Award in the form of an especially designed wrist watch. Since the TSD had been founded in 1991, this award had been granted only once to another person: Prof. em. Elizabeth Miller of Memorial University of Newfoundland, now living in Toronto, known as the "Queen of Dracula Studies."

The award was granted for my research as presented in The Ultimate Dracula (2012), but also for my unearthing of the complete text of Makt myrkranna, and translating it.

The second award was granted by Florin Nechita, organizer of the Transylvania Creative Camp, held in Lapuș in the north of Romania in August 2017 under the auspices of Transilvania University of Brașov. During this camp, around 40 students from Japan, Romania, Italy and Austria met with media and tourism professionals to help design a sustainable tourism development strategy for the Maramureș region, emphasizing its rural and artisan traditions. As Romania is mainly known to foreigners as "Dracula Land," Dracula tourism was one of the topics intensely discussed.

In this workshop, I had a double role: to provide a seminar on travel photography, and to produce a photo documentation of the whole workshop. Still during the workshop, I posted my photos on an internal Facebook group page. Later, a selection was used for an exhibition, and for a digital booklet about the event. When during the bus tour back to Brașov, awards were granted in several categories, I received the final SPECIAL AWARD for my work as a teacher and photographer.

In spring 2018, when I had already relocated to South-East Asia, the Lord Ruthven Assembly granted me a SPECIAL AWARD for my English translation of Makt myrkranna, the Icelandic version of Dracula, and for my background research about the story.

The Lord Ruthven Assembly is a group of academic scholars specializing in vampire and Gothic literature; the group is affiliated with the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA).

The Lord Ruthven Award has been awarded since 1989, in the categories Fiction, Non-Fiction, Media and Special Recognition.