Posted on June 5, 2017 by David Oberhelman

The Mythopoeic Society has announced the finalists for the 2017 Mythopoeic Awards. For more information about the awards, visit the Awards section of this site; the finalists for the literature awards, text of recent acceptance speeches, and selected book reviews are also listed in this section. The winners of this year’s awards will be announced during Mythcon 48, to be held July 28-31, 2017, in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.

You may download the official press release, in PDF format, here.

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Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature

• Andrea Hairston, Will Do Magic For Small Change (Aqueduct Press, 2016)
• Mary Robinette Kowal, Ghost Talkers (Tor, 2016)
• Patricia A. McKillip, Kingfisher (Ace, 2016)
• Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Cycle: The Raven Boys (Scholastic, 2012); The Dream Thieves (Scholastic, 2013); Blue Lily, Lily Blue (Scholastic, 2014); and The Raven King (Scholastic, 2016)
• Jo Walton, Thessaly Trilogy: The Just City (Tor, 2015); The Philosopher Kings (Tor, 2015); Necessity (Tor, 2016)

Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature

• Adam Gidwitz, The Inquisitor’s Tale: Or, The Three Magical Children and their Holy Dog (Dutton, 2016)
• S. E. Grove, The Mapmakers Trilogy: The Class Sentence (Viking 2014); The Golden Specific (Viking, 2015); The Crimson Skew (Viking, 2015)
• Bridget Hodder, The Rat Prince (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2016)
• Grace Lin, When the Sea Turned to Silver (Little, Brown, 2016)
• Delia Sherman, The Evil Wizard Smallbone (Candlewick, 2016)

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies

• Lisa Coutras, Tolkien’s Theology of Beauty: Majesty, Splendor, and Transcendence in Middle Earth (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016)
• Sørina Higgins, ed. The Chapel of the Thorn by Charles Williams (Apocryphile Press, 2015)
• Leslie Donovan, ed. Approaches to Teaching Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Other Works (Modern Language Association, 2015)
• Christopher Tolkien, ed. Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell by J.R.R. Tolkien (Houghton Mifflin, 2014)
• Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015)

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies

• Aisling Byrne, Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature (Oxford University Press, 2015)
• Richard Firth Green, Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016)
• Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn, Children’s Fantasy Literature: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
• Gabrielle Lissauer, The Tropes of Fantasy Fiction (McFarland, 2015)
• Jack Zipes, Grimm Legacies: The Magic Spell of the Grimms’ Folk and Fairy Tales (Princeton University Press, 2014)

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. Books are eligible for two years after publication if not selected as a finalist during the first year of eligibility. Books from a series are eligible if they stand on their own; otherwise, the series becomes eligible the year its final volume appears. 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. Rules for eligibility are otherwise the same as for the Adult literature award. The question of which award a borderline book is best suited for will be decided by consensus of the committees. Books for mature “Young Adults” may be moved to the Adult literature category.

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.

The winners of this year’s awards will be announced during Mythcon 48, to be held from July 28-31, 2017. A complete list of Mythopoeic Award winners is available on the Society web site: Awards.

The finalists for the literature awards, text of recent acceptance speeches, and selected book reviews are also listed in this on-line section. For more information about the Mythopoeic Awards, please contact the Awards Administrator: David D. Oberhelman, awards@mythsoc.org

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