David Green | File 770

The British Fantasy Society (BFS) announced the 2024 British Fantasy Award (BFA) shortlist on August 15. BFS Secretary David Green’s works received five nominations in four different categories. Earlier today the BFS published an update to their announcement (Twitter), addressing social media comments questioning committee influence on the awards process.

Update

As a BFS committee member was lucky enough to receive multiple nomination this year, we had an independent audit carried out prior to the shortlists being finalised. A long-term member in good standing of the BFS was given access to all voting information along with all systems required to check eligibility of voters. This audit supported the final shortlists as displayed here.

The Awards Process

The British Fantasy Awards are voted on by members of the BFS and attendees at Fantasycon. This process is managed by our awards admin – no other committee member has access to or influence over the votes or their collection.

The shortlists are formed from the (usually 4) most voted-for titles. Juries are then empanelled and given the opportunity to add egregious omissions. After this stage, the final shortlists are made public and the juries start reading. The winner is selected by the jury and communicated to the awards admin.

The jury and egregious omissions stages act as checks and balances to ensure that the final shortlist and ultimate winner are selected as objectively as possible.

The awards admin is the only committee member who has any ability to affect or influence the outcome of the awards, and as such, the awards admin is not eligible to be nominated for any awards. The rest of the committee is in exactly the same position as any other member of the society with regard to the awards, with the exception of the Karl Edward Wagner award.

The BFS committee as a whole votes on the recipient of the Karl Edward Wagner award. Serving committee members are not eligible to receive this award – a change which was made to the constitution by the current Chair and President, to remove a potential conflict of interest.

The BFS is run by volunteers – people who give a great deal of time and effort to this community because they love it. Excluding our volunteers from consideration in awards in which they have no influence or control would serve no practical purpose in safeguarding the awards, but would professionally disadvantage our volunteers, which would likely lead to difficulty in recruiting and retaining volunteers. We are a community built largely of publishing professionals – and as a result our volunteers are largely made up of people professionally involved in the industry too.

We would like to thank our awards admin, Katherine Fowler, for the huge effort she puts into this role year on year. We would also like to thank the jurors who help to make the awards possible. Many congratulations to all of the nominees and we wish you the best of luck.

For those wondering what precisely was the impetus for this announcement, File 770 commenter Spider pointed out that a multiple nominee was also involved in the running of the BFS, and also a juror in an unrelated category. D_Libris on Twitter made similar observations.