The World Fantasy Awards were announced last night - I had the pleasure of having been one of the judges along with Misha Stone, Claire Suzanne Elizabeth Cooney, C. C. Finlay and Richard Kadrey. All of whom are lovely and, I hope, had as much fun as I did being involved in the process - intense though it was at times.
Now I read a lot, obviously, for my job but the reading - and the decisions - we had to make during the judging of this award were TOUGH. As an agent, I tend to be brutal with submissions, if a book hasn’t caught my attention within a few pages, then it's not one for me. It may not be fair, but it’s something that has to be done with limited time - every read is subjective and if it’s not one for me, personally, then it’s likely to be for somebody else. Guaranteed, if you put five people into a room with one book, each will have a very different opinion on it.
So what do you do when you're presented with hundreds of talented writers, all of whom bring something different to the table, all of whom are polished, published and have a different voice, perspective and energy? And out of all those writers - you have to choose one of them from each category - and ensure that your opinion and choice is also shared with four other people who all have their own individual tastes and interests? A challenge you say? Hell yes!
We had a LOT of discussions (all very polite I hasten to add - SFF people really are the nicest) and lots of meetings and there were a lot of laughs and frustrations shared, that there just weren't more categories so we could do more justice to the fabulous authors we were reading. How could we possibly narrow down such a wealth of talent to such a, seemingly, small selection of criteria?
And publishing has grown and changed so much since the award was first established - I don't know what the submission rate was like originally, but with all the publishers and independents submitting 10-15 authors each - there was a LOT of reading - I'll admit my submission pile suffered as I went through everything on the list. Kudos to those judges who accepted physical copies (I was reading electronically), their houses must have been more book than brick by the end of it all. And the problem (although what a problem to have) was 99% of it was bloody excellent. I’d like to thank everyone who submitted their work - or had their work submitted - for making my life SO damned difficult over six months of reading - but bringing so much enjoyment to it while doing so. There were times I was tempted to just toss a coin, it might've been easier. 😄
However, in the end - there were a few standouts - and, as we were narrowing the lists and coming up with our five favourites for each category, we realised there were the same few titles coming up on everyone's shortlist. That’s when the deep delving began, into what we loved about each writer, what we thought they brought to the table in terms of reinvigorating the genre, why, out of everything we’d read - they stood out for each of us.
Ironically, after going through each and every entry, so carefully, the final shortlist was put together relatively quickly, just because we all knew what we'd absolutely loved. There was much discussion over who to choose as winners - we all had our favourites - but, actually, we were all 100% in agreement with the final choices.
To my mind, each of these shortlisted authors - and each of these winning writers - bought something new and exciting to the genre. A fresh perspective, a twist on a familiar trope, a diversity of voice and opinion. They looked at the genre’s traditional boundaries, crossed them - sometimes just broke them to bits - and moved the genre on. So I’d like to offer my personal congratulations to each and every writer on the shortlists - and thank for them for sharing their voices with us.
It's a hugely exciting time for the genre when we see such a range of great writing coming into play and I look forward to seeing more of it in the future.
Full list of winners are here: https://locusmag.com/2022/11/2022-world-fantasy-awards-winners/