Delany Named SFWA Grand Master

Samuel Delany is SFWA’s pick for the 2013 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. This is a long-deserved honor for someone who has been one of sf’s most dynamic and gifted writers since the 1960s. 

Samuel Delany

Samuel Delany

The winner of four Nebulas and two Hugos, Delany’s body of work includes Nova, Dhalgren, Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand, and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. He has also written influential sf criticism, published in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Starboard Wine and The American Shore. He was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2002.

Since 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, where for three years he was Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program.

Heavenly BreakfastIn 2010 he won the third J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction from the academic Eaton Science Fiction Conference at UCR Libraries. He is also a recipient of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime’s contribution to lesbian and gay literature.

The selection is made by the President of SFWA. Steven Gould had this to say about his choice:

Samuel R. Delany is one of science fiction’s most influential authors, critics, and teachers and it is my great honor to announce his selection. When discussing him as this year’s choice with the board, past-presidents, and members, the most frequent response I received was, “He’s not already?” Well he is now.

Delany acknowledged the honor —

This award astonishes me, humbles me, and I am honored by it. It recalls to me–with the awareness of mortality age ushers up–the extraordinary writers who did not live to receive it: Roger Zelazny, Joanna Russ, Thomas M. Disch, Octavia E. Butler–as well, from the generation before me, Katherine MacLean, very much alive. I accept the award for them, too: they are the stellar practitioners without whom my own work, dim enough, would have been still dimmer.

The award will be presented at the Nebula Awards Weekend in San Jose, CA, May 16-18, 2014.

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