World fantasy awards changing its trophy
World Fantasy award drops HP Lovecraft as prize image
The World Fantasy award trophy will no longer be modelled on HP Lovecraft, it has been announced, following a campaign last year that called the author out as an “avowed racist” with “hideous opinions”.
The change was revealed at the World Fantasy Convention on Sunday, where David Mitchell took the top award, the best novel prize, for The Bone Clocks. It beat titles by authors including Jeff VanderMeer, Robert Jackson Bennett, Jo Walton and Katherine Addison to the best novel prize, with other winners at the Saratoga Springs convention including Ramsey Campbell and Sheri S Tepper, who took life achievement awards.
But organisers also used the ceremony to announce that this would be the last year that winners would receive a statuette modelled on the face of Lovecraft, Locus magazine reported. No reason was given for the change, and no details have yet been announced about what will replace Lovecraft, but authors including Daniel José Older have expressed delight at the news. “THEY JUST ANNOUNCED THE WORLD FANTASY AWARD WILL NO LONGER BE HP LOVECRAFT. WE DID IT. YOU DID IT. IT’S DONE. YESSSSSSSS,” tweeted Older.
The writer
World Fantasy awards pressed to drop HP Lovecraft trophy in racism row
The board of the World Fantasy awards has said that it is “in discussion” about its winners’ statuette, modelled on the late HP Lovecraft, after calls for the trophy to be changed due to Lovecraft’s “fundamental racism”.
Over the past four decades, the prestigious fantasy prize has been won by writers including Michael Moorcock, Gene Wolfe and Haruki Murakami. It comes in the shape of a bust of Lovecraft, the creator of the Cthulhu mythos and prolific writer of weird fiction, who – 2011’s best novel winner Nnedi Okorafor was stunned to discover – was also the author of a poem that concludes with a description of black people as “a beast … in semi-human figure ... filled ... with vice”.
At the time, the Nigerian-American author wrote of her conflicted feelings over the fact that “a statuette of this racist man’s head is one of my greatest honours as a writer”. Now her fellow author Daniel José Older has launched a petition calling for the organisers of the prize to make the late African-American science fiction writer Octavia Butler the inspiration for the statue rather than Lovecraft.
Older has almost 2,5
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The Hugo Award trophies, which provide recognition and incentives by the way of awards to demonstrate excellence in the field of science fiction and fantasy, vary from year to year, but all (save 1958’s awards) feature one prominent element: the finned Hugo rocket which stands atop the trophy.
The earliest Hugo Award trophy used a rocket designed by Jack McKnight and Ben Jason based upon the hood ornament from a 1950s American automobile; however, the shape of the rocket changed over the years as individual committees reinterpreted the design. The current design of the trophy rocket, which is now considered definitive, has been the same since Peter Weston’s refinement of the design debuted in 1984. Since then, every Hugo Award trophy rocket (except those used in 1991) has been literally cast from the same mold by Ashwater Foundry in England.
Each Worldcon Committee designs a base for the trophy. Some have been fairly plain; others have moved toward the fanciful and whimsical. The 1992 Hugo Award, presented by MagiCon, included pieces of an actual gantry from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, while the 1994 Hugo Award, presented by ConAdian, contained pie
I’ve been working in books and publishing since 2004, I’ve been a sci-fi/fantasy fan since my mom read us The Hobbit, complete with voices and songs, and I still manage to mix up my Hugos with my Nebulas, fail to remember which formerly-known-as award is now called what, and lose track of newly-created awards. So, to do a favor for both myself and anyone else who has this problem but still wants to at least pretend to keep track, I present to you this deep dive into fantasy and science fiction awards!
Some notes and caveats: This is not a comprehensive list, and an omission of an award is in no way a judgement upon it. These are the ones I am most familiar with and that came up when I polled fellow SF/F aficionados (with especial thanks to Alex Acks, writer of our Swords and Spaceships newsletter). For a much more comprehensive list, check out the Science Fiction Awards+ Database (with thanks to the readers who sent that in!). This is also entirely organized around English-language publications and prizes, since that’s the only language I’m fluent in. (For now! Rosetta Stone is on my homescreen and I have Ambitions.) All the below information came from publicly available