The West Passage Wins Crawford Award

Jared Pechaček’s The West Passage (Tor) won this year’s the Crawford Award, presented at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando FL on March 22, 2025. The award jury received 59 submissions from over 30 publishers, by authors from 20 different countries. Eleven of the submitted novels were translations. Judges were Brian Attebery, Eddie Clark, Candas Jane Dorsey, Mimi Mondal, and Yilin Wang.

The administrator was Farah Mendlesohn, who is stepping down to assume another role in the organization and will be succeeded by Kelly Robson.  The Honour List for the Crawford Award includes Meihan Boey’s The Formidable Miss Cassidy, Gareth Brown’s The Book of Doors, The Book of Denial by Ricardo Chavez Castañeda (text)/Alejandro Magallanes (art)/Lawrence Schimel (translator), Cécile Cristofari’s Elephants in Bloom, L B Hazelthorn’s Rare birds, Sung-il Kim’s (trans. Anton Hur) Blood of the Old Kings, and John Wiswell’s Someone You Can Build A Nest In.

Jared Pechaček’s The West Passage is a book of “compelling contrasts. Unflashily elegant prose set against detailed, bizarre illuminations. A distinct sense of whimsy and humour alongside some quite visceral body horror. A deeply weird world to grapple with, sketched out in the course of a clear bildungsroman narrative. And all of this coheres to great effect. Shades of Mervyn Peake but entirely its own thing, the West Passage is a truly surprising, confident debut.”