The 2024 Manly Wade Wellman Award for North Carolina Science Fiction and Fantasy winner was announced at ConGregate 10 on July 12 in Winston-Salem, NC. The award is presented by the North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation.
2024 Manly Wade Wellman Award Winner
- The Night Field by Donna Glee Williams
Accepting her award with prepared remarks, Williams said:
I’m so honored to be counted among this group of finalists. I am—we are—deeply grateful to the North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation for lifting our stories to the attention of wider audiences. There is no greater gift you can give authors. Thank you!
And thank you, also, to the people without whom The Night Field could never have been written, oh, about 45 or 50 of ‘em—but I’ll just mention a few. My amazing grandpappy of an agent, Richard Curtis, who shepherded this book through during the Pandemic, probably the toughest time to sell a novel since the Great Depression. And, of course, my editorial team at Quercus: Anne Perry, Ian Critchfield, and Jo Fletcher. A true confederation of the mighty.
In another vein, I offer my gratitude to the spirit of the Woman Warrior, especially the YOUNG Woman Warrior. She’s walked the Earth since the beginning of human history, wearing different faces at different times: Joan of Arc during the Middle Ages, Hannah Szenes during World War 2, Malala Yousafzai, X González, and Greta Thunberg, today. The Night Field owes Her a debt of inspiration; I hope Pyn-Poi and her friend Lakka are worthy to represent Her on the imaginal landscape.
And my last big thank you is to the readers who said Yes to walking with Pyn-Poi on every step of her long, hard journey. I know I put you through A LOT, but I don’t apologize, because the abuses and abominations that Pyn-Poi grappled with in the imaginary world of The Night Field are things that real, live women, men, and children have struggled with in what we laughingly call “The Real World”: enslaved on plantations, on share-cropping farms, on prison farms, on banana plantations during the US Fruit Company’s takeover of Central America, and in work-camps all over the world. The Night Field is fiction, but oppressive agriculture is NOT. So THANK YOU for opening your hearts to this story.
And to what comes next.
As you know, the climate catastrophe is here, and it means business. Every single one of us is going to have to hero up to face the coming storms AND the Four Horsemen of Homeostasis which our poor battered planet is going to deploy—is ALREADY deploying—to reduce the numbers of her most troublesome species. Full participation—that’s what this moment is calling for if human life and wellbeing are to last on this planet. It is my hope that The Night Field’s Pyn-Poi will inspire each of you to pick up whatever part of that great work is yours to carry, and to carry the hell out of it.
The Manly Wade Wellman Award was founded in 2013 to recognize outstanding achievement in science fiction and fantasy novels written by North Carolina authors. The 2024 award covers novels published in 2023 and marks the 11th presentation of the award.
The award is named for long-time North Carolina author Manly Wade Wellman with the permission of his estate.
[Based on a press release.]
