The FIYAHCON 2021 committee has announced the winners for the 2021 Ignyte Awards, which “seek to celebrate the vibrancy and diversity of the current and future landscapes of science fiction, fantasy, and horror by recognizing incredible feats in storytelling and outstanding efforts toward inclusivity of the genre.” Winners were presented at an online ceremony on September 18, 2021.
Best Novel — Adult
Remainders of the American Century: Post-Apocalyptic Novels in the Age of U.S. Decline, Brent Ryan Bellamy (Wesleyan University Press 978-0819580313, $24.95, 256pp, pb) June 2021.
In this fascinating study of primarily US post-apocalyptic fiction from the end of WWII through the 2007-8 financial crisis, Brent Ryan Bellamy engages with “the fields of American studies, science fiction studies, and print culture studies” to unpack how these narratives have changed over ...Read More
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Baltimore reading series Charm City Spec held its first in-person event of the year on July 14 on the patio of The Ivy Bookshop, with readings by Sarah Pinsker, Michael R. Underwood, Kate Reed Petty, K.M. Szpara, and Karen Osborne. The quarterly event is sponsored by the Baltimore Science Fiction Society with support from The Ivy Bookshop and ‘‘a generous grant from SFWA.’’ Information about upcoming events can be found ...Read More
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The Speculative Literature Foundation (SLF) is accepting applications for its $1,000 Working Class Writers Grant, “awarded annually to assist working class, blue-collar, poor, and homeless writers who have been historically underrepresented in speculative fiction, due to financial barriers.” Applications are open until September 30, 2021. The winner will be announced November 15, 2021.
For more information, see the SLF website.
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The National Book Awards Fiction 10-title longlist has been announced, including works of genre interest:
There were 415 books submitted for the 2021 Fiction category. The judges are Alan Michael Parker, Emily Pullen, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, Luis Alberto Urrea (chair), and Charles Yu.
Five finalists will be announced October 5, 2021, and winners on November 17, ...Read More
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This Poison Heart, Kalynn Bayron (Bloomsbury 978-1547603909, 384pp, $18.99, hc) June 2021.
Briseis Greene has a thing for plants. Literally. Ever since she was little, Bri has had the inexplicable ability to make plants grow. Plants react to her emotions and often bend toward her as if she were a walking, talking ray of sunshine. Her adoptive mothers, Thandie and Angie, don’t quite know what to do with her. ...Read More
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The National Book Awards Translated Literature 10-title longlist has been announced, including works of genre interest:
Jack Four, Neal Asher (Tor UK 978-1529049978, £20.00, 448pp, hc) June 2021. Cover by Steve Stone.
One of Neal Asher’s specialties is monsters (though not of the cute sort), and the new Polity novel, Jack Four, is all monsters, all the time. It starts with brutal mercenaries and their alien customers and works its way up through nearly indestructible mutated alien warriors and their transformed sort-of-human shock troops, ...Read More
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Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley (FSG) is the winner of the $1,000 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, which recognizes “a published translation of poetry from any language into English that shows literary excellence.” The 2021 judge was Indran Amirthanayagam.
For more information, see the official website.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader ...Read More
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Fix, Grist‘s “solutions lab,” has announced three winners for their Imagine 2200 Short Story Contest. The contest aimed “to envision a clean, just future… [and] create stories of life in that future.” The theme was “Climate fiction for future ancestors.” Winners are:
Other finalists were:
Hatfield House in Philadelphia PA has announced a new exhibit by Afrofuturist group Black Quantum Futurism. The exhibit “Ancestors returning again / this time only to themselves” was created by Rasheeda Phillips and Camae Ayewa, with nods to artists who influenced Afrofuturism, including Octavia E. Butler and Sun Ra. It includes the debut of video and sound installation Write No History:
Write No History features found and archival footage ...Read More
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Time has named author N.K. Jemisin as one of the 100 most influential people of 2021 in the “Artists” category. Jemisin is the award-winning author of The City We Became, the Broken Earth trilogy, the Inheritance Trilogy, and more.
For the full list and more details, see the Time article.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely ...Read More
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The Horror Writers Association (HWA) announced the recipients of its 2021 scholarships and diversity grants.
Eugen M. Bacon, Jonathan Kincade, Tonya Liburd, Somto Ihezue Onyedikachi, and Juan Manuel Pérez are winners of the $500 Diversity Grants, given to “underrepresented, diverse people who have an interest in the horror writing genre, including, but not limited to writers, editors, reviewers, and library workers.”
Shannon DeAnne Lawrence won the $2,500 Horror Writers Association ...Read More
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The National Book Awards Young People’s Literature 10-title longlist has been announced, including titles of genre interest:
The judges ...Read More
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The Ladies of Horror Fiction (LOHF) have announced the winners of their annual Writers Grant:
Each will receive $100. The grants are “inclusive to all women who have reasonably demonstrated a commitment
Billingsley, Franny: The Robber Girl
(Candlewick Press 978-0-7636-6956-0, $18.99, 416pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, September 14, 2021)
Middle-grade fantasy/mystery novel about a girl who relies on her knife, but needs her wits when magical dolls give her three tasks.
Boyle, T.C.: Talk to Me
(HarperCollins/Ecco 978-0-06-305285-7, $27.99, 352pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, September 14, 2021)
An animal behaviorist, his young chimp who speaks sign language, and enthusiastic undergraduate Aimee ...Read More
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The Coming Storm, Regina M. Hansen (Atheneum 978-1-5344-8244-9, $17.99, 272pp, hc) June 2021. Cover by Tran Nguyen.
Regina Hansen’s darkly charming novel, The Coming Storm, is a historic fantasy heavily steeped in folklore and place. Set in 1949 among the Scottish-Canadian community of Prince Edward Island, it tells a story of mythological monsters and music that calls to mind stories like Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks, ...Read More
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The Omega Sci-Fi Awards have announced the creation of the Feminist Futures Award. The Feminist Futures Award will be co-presented by Artemis Journal, and “will be awarded to a distinct winner for an outstanding feminist sci-fi story.”
This award recognizes a science fiction story that embraces feminist themes. Top entries will exemplify excellence in feminist storytelling. We encourage stories that capture the complexities and other aspects of identity, as well ...Read More
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The six-title shortlist for the 2021 Booker Prize has been announced, and includes Bewilderment by Richard Powers (Norton).
The £50,000 prize is “open to works by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.” This year’s judges are Horatia Harrod, Maya Jasanoff (chair), Natascha McElhone, Chigozie Obioma, Rowan Williams.
Shortlisted authors receive £2,500 and a “specially bound edition of their book.” Winners will be
The shortlists for the 2021 Polari Prizes have been announced, and the Polari Book Prize includes the following titles of genre interest:
The Polari Book Prize is given to writers born or based in the UK and Ireland who are “emerging and established LGBTQ+ literary talent.” The award is sponsored by DHH Literary Agency, ...Read More
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Ernest R. Dickerson, Gemma Files, Brian Keene, John Edward Lawson, and Sheree Renée Thomas have been announced as the StokerCon 2022 Guests of Honor.
The event will be held May 12-15, 2022 at the Curtis Hotel in Denver CO, and will include the Bram Stoker Awards banquet.
For more information, see the official website.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring ...Read More
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Uncanny 5-6/21 Apex #124
Uncanny #40 is full of good fiction. Fran Wilde‘s novelette “Unseelie Brothers, Ltd.” leads off. Gowns made by the legendary Unseelie Brothers atelier have brought everyone in Sera Sebastian’s life together: her Aunt Vanessa and her husband, her father and her mother (who vanished not long after Sera’s birth). The shop, which disappears for periods of time and then appears at varying locations, ...Read More
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The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA) has opened submissions for the 12th Annual Imagining Indigenous Futurisms Award for “emerging authors who use science fiction to address issues of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination” until November 1, 2021.
Applicants must send a “200-word statement with background & goals in writing SF” and a “4,000-word maximum writing sample addressing Indigenous perspectives” to Professor Grace L. Dillon at dillong@pdx.edu. For ...Read More
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Goblin, Josh Malerman (Earthling 978-0-9962118-5-7, $50.00, 376pp, hc) October 2017. (Del Rey 978-0-593-23780-3, $28.00, 416pp, hc) May 2021. Cover by Deena Warner.
With Goblin, Josh Malerman joins the select group of authors who have given readers a memorable fictional town that will forever mark a spot in the literary map of our minds. Like Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo or Stephen King’s Castle Rock, Malerman’s Goblin feels like a ...Read More
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LAVIE TIDHAR was born November 16, 1976 and raised on a kibbutz in Israel. He has traveled extensively since he was a teenager, living in South Africa, the UK, Laos, and the small island nation of Vanuatu.
Tidhar began publishing with a poetry collection in Hebrew in 1998, but soon moved to fiction, becoming a prolific author of short stories early in the 21st century. Story “Temporal Spiders, Spatial Webs” ...Read More
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The spread of the delta variant of COVID-19 has slowed the momentum among publishers to return to working in the office. Hachette Book Group has postponed its plans to reopen in September, with CEO Michael Pietsch explaining, “We have not set a new reopening schedule at this time. When we decide it is safe to proceed with reopening, we will provide a minimum of four weeks’ notice before we proceed.” ...Read More
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Version Zero, David Yoon (Putnam 9-780-59319035-7, $27.00, 368pp, hc) May 2021.
David Yoon – husband to the bestselling writer Nicola Yoon and bestseller himself for Frankly in Love – makes a compelling case for burning the entire internet down in Version Zero. #JokingNotJoking
Yoon has created a here-and-now that is just slightly askew from our own here and now. Main character Max is working in Silicon Valley for ...Read More
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Clarkesworld 6/21 Anathema 5/21 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 5/20/21, 6/3/21
The June Clarkesworld leads off with “Little Animals” by Nancy Kress. Elena is our point-of-view character, a woman who is “borderline depressive.” She’s part of a research team that is using quantum effects to be able to “receive” the mental impressions of people who lived in the past. This is as much an art as a science, and ...Read More
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The #DisneyMustPay Task Force, created by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and dedicated to making media giant Disney honor its author contracts, has expanded its focus. The task force is now ‘‘reaching out to all comic book and graphic novel creators who may be missing royalty statements and payments from Disney and its companies.’’ Mary Robinette Kowal, chair of the task force, says, ‘‘Writers, artists, illustrators, ...Read More
Read moreLongtime fan Genevieve DiModica, 73, known to friends as Gene or Genie, died of natural causes over the weekend of August 28, 2021 at her summer home in Beach Haven NJ. Genie was born in Middletown CT on January 7, 1948. She attended Carnegie Mellon University (then Carnegie Tech) in Pittsburgh PA, where she first became a part of the science fiction community.
There, in the late ’60s, she (together ...Read More
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Karen Tei Yamashita will receive the National Book Foundation‘s 2021 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, to be presented during the annual National Book Award ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street on November 17. David Steinberger, chair of the NBF Board of Directors, said,
A bold and groundbreaking writer, Yamashita’s deeply creative body of work has made an enduring impact on our literary landscape. Whether it’s an evocative exploration of ...Read More
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The Science Fiction Poetry Association (SFPA) has announced the 2021 Dwarf Stars Award winners.
The Dwarf Stars Award is given by the SFPA to recognize the best speculative poem of one to ...Read More
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