Posted on December 8, 2020 by David Emerson

The Mythopoeic Society has announced the finalists for the 2020 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 in early 2021. (Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mythcon was not held in the summer of 2020, and the awards committees needed extra time to obtain and evaluate nominated books, thus necessitating a delay in the awards processes.)

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

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Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature

• P. Djèlí Clark, The Haunting of Tram Car 015 (Tor.com, 2019)
• Theodora Goss, Snow White Learns Witchcraft (Mythic Delirium Books, 2019)
• Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January (Redhook, 2019)
• Jo Walton, Lent: A Novel of Many Returns (Tor Books, 2019)
• G. Willow Wilson, The Bird King (Grove Press, 2019)

Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature

• Erin Entrada Kelly, Lalani of the Distant Sea (Green Willow Books, 2019)
• Yoon Ha Lee, Dragon Pearl (Rick Riordan Presents, 2019)
• Hilary McKay, The Time of Green Magic (Macmillan, 2019)
• Suzanne Nelson, A Tale Magnolius (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019)
• Anne Ursu, The Lost Girl (Walden Pond Press, 2019)

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies

• Amy Amendt-Raduege, “The Sweet and the Bitter”: Death and Dying in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (The Kent State University Press, 2018)
• Dimitra Fimi and Thomas M. Honegger, eds, Sub-creating Arda: World-building in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Work, its Precursors and its Legacies (Walking Tree Publishers, 2019)
• Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson and Michael Partridge, eds, Informing the Inklings: George MacDonald and the Victorian Roots of Modern Fantasy (Winged Lion Press. 2018)
• Catherine McIlwaine, Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth (Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2018)
• John Rateliff, ed, A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger (Gabbro Head, 2018)

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies

• Maria Sachiko Cecire, Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century (University of Minnesota Press, 2019)
• James Gifford, A Modernist Fantasy: Modernism, Anarchism, and the Radical Fantastic (ELS Editions, 2018)
• C. Palmer-Patel, The Shape of Fantasy: Investigating the Structure of American Heroic Epic Fantasy (Routledge, 2019)
• Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games (New York University Press, 2019)
• Mark J.P. Wolf, ed, The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds (Routledge, 2017)

The Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature is given to the fantasy novel, multi-volume, or single-author story collection for adults published during 2018 or 2019 that best exemplifies the spirit of the Inklings. Books are eligible for two years after publication if 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 (2017–2019) 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 online in early 2021. 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: , awards@mythsoc.org

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