World Fantasy Award 2020 — Artist

My beautiful Vincent-Villafranca-sculpted World Fantasy Award trophy arrived today, all the way from Salt Lake City.

Here it is in a hammock of jasmine, which having long ago roped shut the front gate and recently reached the top of the tallest tree in the front yard, is now busily lassoing the neighbouring trees and has sent out a single flowering trailer to climb the dead staghorn-supporting trunk (dead-staghorn supporting?) in the lavender patch.

It smells divine and can only attributed to me in that I have had absolutely no interaction with it except to occasionally fight a five-strand cable of vines lashed around the mailbox.

The lavender, although deliberately planted by my last housemate, Aimee, is similarly the beneficiary of benign neglect, varying between vertical potpourri and a hot-spot for lazy bees.

World Fantasy Award Nominations

The World Fantasy Award shortlist was released early this morning, and I am on it (in my artist guise)! It is of course exciting, but also humbling to be listed alongside all these wonderful artists and books and people).

And it is, of course, one of many great places to find new things to read…

NOVEL

• Queen of the Conquered, by Kacen Callender (Orbit)
• The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow (Redhook Books/Orbit UK)
• The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie (Orbit)
• Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir (Tor.com)
• The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa (trans.Stephen Snyder) (Pantheon/Harvill Secker)

NOVELLA

• “The Butcher’s Table,” by Nathan Ballingrud (Wounds: Six Stories From the Border of Hell)
• Desdemona and the Deep, by C.S.E. Cooney (Tor.com)
• In an Absent Dream, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com)
• The Deep, by Rivers Solomon with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes (Saga
  Press/Hodder & Stoughton UK)
• Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh (Tor.com)

SHORT FICTION

• “For He Can Creep,” by Siobhan Carroll (Tor.com, July 10, 2019)
• “Read After Burning,” by Maria Dahvana Headley, (A People’s Future of the United States)
• “The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye,” by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, July-Aug. 2019)
• “Blood is Another Word For Hunger,” by Rivers Solomon (Tor.com, July 24, 2019)
• “Postlude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” by Jerome Stueart (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,
  Mar./Apr. 2019)
• “Everyone Knows That They‘re Dead. Do You?,” by Genevieve Valentine (The Outcast Hours)

ANTHOLOGY

• Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, edited by Ellen Datlow (Saga Press)
• The Outcast Hours, edited by Mahvesh Murad & Jared Shurin (Solaris)
• The Mythic Dream, edited by Dominik Parisien & Navah Wolfe (Saga Press)
• New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, edited by Nisi Shawl (Solaris)
• The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (Vintage Books)

COLLECTION

• Homesick: Stories, by Nino Cipri (Dzanc Books)
• Song For the Unraveling of the World: Stories, by Brian Evenson (Coffee House Press)
• Unforeseen, by Molly Gloss (Saga Press)
• A Lush and Seething Hell: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror, by John Hornor Jacobs (Harper Voyager)
• Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea: Stories by Sarah Pinsker (Small Beer Press)

ARTIST

• Tommy Arnold
• Galen Dara
• Julie Dillon
• Wendy Froud
• Kathleen Jennings

SPECIAL AWARD – PROFESSIONAL

• C. C. Finlay, for F&SF editing
• Leslie Klinger, for The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft: Beyond Arkham (Liveright)
• Ellen Oh, for We Need Diverse Books
• Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, for The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (New York University Press)
• Sheree Renée Thomas, for contributions to the genre

SPECIAL AWARD – NON-PROFESSIONAL

• Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Laura E. Goodin and Esko Suoranta, for Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research
• Michael Kelly, for Undertow Publications and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction
• Jonathan Strahan & Gary K. Wolfe, for the Coode Street Podcast
• Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, for Uncanny Magazine
• Terri Windling, for Myth & Moor

World Fantasy Judges!

The 2019 World Fantasy Awards Judges have been announced, so if I seem to be quieter either online generally or about my reading, specifically, this is why!

The judges are:

• Nancy Holder (USA)
• Kathleen Jennings (Australia)
• Stephen Graham Jones  (USA)
• Garry Kilworth (United Kingdom)
• Tod McCoy (USA)

Details on submitting works for consideration are here: https://locusmag.com/2018/12/2019-world-fantasy-awards-judges-announced/

The judges will be reading and considering eligible materials until June 1, 2019. All forms of fantasy are eligible, e.g. epic, dark, contemporary, literary.

Qualifications: All books must have been published in 2018; magazines must have a 2018 cover date; only living persons are eligible.

The award categories are:  Life Achievement; Best Novel; Best Novella (10,001 to 40,000 words); Best Short Story; Best Anthology; Best Collection; Best Artist; Special Award: Professional; Special Award: Non-Professional.

 

I have returned!

I am back, I am dealing with jet lag which I never adequately believed in before, the sketchbook is scanned and I will begin posting it shortly.

However, to begin with, many congratulations to all the nominees and winners of the World Fantasy Award, and of course particular to Vincent Chong, winner of the Artist category with his sepia-soaked, textured worlds, and to my fellow nominees Didier Graffet and Dave Senior, with their clean effective design, J.K. Potter‘s dark collections and Chris Roberts‘ bright nightmares.

Storybook Dalek

This instalment of the Dalek Game is for Fables Vol 3: Storybook Love, which, just – I love. I admire the concept and execution of Fables generally, and beyond that I frequently adore (or loathe, or both!) the characters, and those two things aren’t always sides of the same coin. But of course, this also means this drawing is for The Princess Bride, and therefore also for Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid and for Mark Knopfler, and all good things. And for initial capitals in fairytale books, with which I filled far too many pages of old sketchbooks.

In other news: All I’ve been able to manage about the World Fantasy Award ballot (after many tweets of congratulations) is “meep!”

And just today, Ticonderoga Publications announced Midnight and Moonshine , a collection of intertwined stories – cold and cruelly beautiful – by awesome fellow-present-and-past nominees Lisa Hannett and Angela Slatter. And I did the cover :)