The finalists for the 2016 David Gemmell Awards have been announced. Open public voting will continue through August 19. The winners will be announced September 24 at Fantasycon in Scarborough (UK).
Legend Award – 2016
The Legend Award is presented to the fantasy title judged the year’s best by open vote.
- Miles Cameron, The Dread Wyrm (Gollancz)
- Larry Correia, Son of the Black Sword (Baen)
- David Guymer, Gotrek & Felix: Slayer (Black Library)
- John Gwynne, Ruin (Pan Macmillan)
- Mark Lawrence, The Liar’s Key (Harper/Voyager)
Morningstar Award – 2016
The Morningstar Award honours the author judged, by open vote, to have made the year’s best debut in fantasy fiction.
- Stephen Aryan, Battlemage (Orbit)
- Seth Dickinson, The Traitor (Pan Macmillan)
- Francesca Haig, The Fire Sermon (Harper/Voyager)
- Lucy Hounsom, Starborn (Pan Macmillan)
- Peter Newman, The Vagrant (Harper/Voyager)
- Sabaa Tahir, An Ember in the Ashes (Harper/Voyager)
All of the works that made the longlist have been rolled over as finalists. The administrators explained:
We normally have five finalists in each category, except in the case of a draw, which has happened only once in the awards’ history. However, as we had just six nominees for the Morningstar this year, and the number of votes separating fifth and sixth place weren’t that great, we thought it was fairest to let all six nominees go through to the final.
Ravenheart Award
The Ravenheart Award is given to the artist/s responsible for the year’s best fantasy book cover art, as chosen by open vote.
View the artwork from each of the nominees here.
- Kerem Beyit for The Dread Wyrm by Miles Cameron (Gollancz)
- Jason Chan for The Liar’s Key by Mark Lawrence (Harper/Voyager)
- Larry Elmore & Carol Russo Design for Son of the Black Sword by Larry Correia
- (Baen)
- Raymond Swanland for Archaon: Lord of Chaos by Rob Sanders (Black Library)
- Paul Young for Ruin by John Gwynne (Pan Macmillan)
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Am I the only person here who has never read anything by Gemmell, or at least don’t remember doing so?
And the Awards website doesn’t explain what the criteria is for selecting nominees. It is excellence in military SF? Or swords and whatever?
The absence of the big names like Sanderson, Abercrombie, Novik, Hobb is puzzling. It looks like the authors who tweeted / spread the voting news on social media won big. (Sanderson, Hobb etc didn’t bother to do so).
Nominee Mark Lawrence comes to the same conclusion (except that he’s trying to be more… optimistic about it):
@Bartimeaus: That’s why authors such as Hobb and Novik don’t do it. They know that doing so would cheapen the award. Some authors seem to have not learned this lesson.
Just voted, though the Morningstar is the only category where I actually have a preference. For the other two, I only have “definitely not that” preferences.