The Mythopoeic Society has released the finalists for the 2016 Mythopoeic Awards. The winners of this year’s awards will be announced during Mythcon 47, August 5-8 in San Antonio.
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature
- Holly Black, The Darkest Part of the Forest (Little, Brown)
- Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (Knopf)
- E.K. Johnston, A Thousand Nights (Disney-Hyperion)
- Naomi Novik, Uprooted (Del Rey)
- Daniel José Older, Shadowshaper (Arthur A. Levine Books)
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature
- Cassie Beasley, Circus Mirandus (Dial)
- Robert Beatty, Serafina and The Black Cloak (Disney-Hyperion)
- Sarah Beth Durst, The Girl Who Could Not Dream (Clarion Books)
- Terry Pratchett, Tiffany Aching Series: Wee Free Men; Hat Full of Sky; Wintersmith; I Shall Wear Midnight; The Shepherd’s Crown (HarperCollins)
- Ursula Vernon, Castle Hangnail (Dial Books)
Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies
- Verlyn Flieger, ed. The Story of Kullervo by J.R.R. Tolkien (HarperCollins, 2015)
- Grevel Lindop , Charles Williams: The Third Inkling (Oxford Univ. Press, 2015)
- Alistair E. McGrath, C. S. Lewis—A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet (Tyndale House, 2013)
- Abigail Santamaria, Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. Lewis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015)
- Christopher Tolkien, ed., Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary Together with Sellic Spell by J.R.R. Tolkien (Houghton Mifflin, 2014)
Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies
- Stefan Ekman, Here Be Dragons: Exploring Fantasy Maps and Settings (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 2013)
- Daniel Gabelman, George MacDonald: Divine Carelessness and Fairytale Levity (Baylor University Press, 2013)
- Melanie Keene, Science in Wonderland: The Scientific Fairy Tales of Victorian Britain (Oxford Univ., Press, 2015)
- Heather O’Donoghue, English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History (Oxford Univ. Press, 2014)
- Jamie Williamson, The Evolution of Modern Fantasy: From Antiquarianism to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)
The Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature is given to the fantasy novel, multi-volume, or single-author story collection for adults published during 2015 that best exemplifies the spirit of the Inklings.
The Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature honors books for beginning readers to age thirteen, in the tradition of The Hobbit or The Chronicles of Narnia.
The Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies is given to books on Tolkien, Lewis, and/or Williams that make significant contributions to Inklings scholarship. For this award, books first published during the last three years (2013–2015) are eligible, including finalists for previous years.
The Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies is given to scholarly books on other specific authors in the Inklings tradition, or to more general works on the genres of myth and fantasy. The period of eligibility is three years, as for the Inklings Studies award.
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Ooo! Congratulations to our own Wombat! I had that book on my Hugo ballot! 🙂
Congrats, Ursula!
Oor Wombat not only nominated, but in a category with pTerry! High cotton!
Can anyone point to where the organizers say what they mean by “exemplifies the spirit of the Inkings”? These writers were well known for religion being a very important part of their worldview, so nominating (for one) ultra-skeptic Pratchett seems odd.
@Vasha
Looks like the Society covers both their viewpoint on religion and criteria for classifying works here:
http://www.mythsoc.org/about/
It seems fair enough as written.
@Stoic Cynic: Thanks for that. It’s actually a very good statement of purpose. Myth, and its reflection in fantasy literature, is indeed a very fruitful source of storytelling. It seems they’ve taken inspiration from one aspect of their source, the Inklings, and branched off in a wider and deeper direction. I don’t know a thing about Charles Williams, but I would agree that both Tolkien and Lewis had really good engagement with myth. But the fact that the Mythopoeic Society can incoporate such diverse works as TShadowshaper and the Tiffany Aching books in their awards shows that they’re not tied to the particular approaches to myth that Lewis and Tolkien had.
A Hat Full of Sky won in 2005, so it’s interesting that it’s been nominated again as part of the series.
Another interesting fact: Digger won in 2013 in the Adult Literature category, so if Ursula Vernon wins this year she’ll be the 3rd author to have won both the Adult and Children’s awards. (Jane Yolen and Delia Sherman are the other two).