Posted on May 17, 2023 by Dennis Wise

The Mythopoeic Society has announced the finalists for the 2023 Mythopoeic Awards. For more information about the awards, visit the Awards section of this site; the finalists for the literature and scholarship awards and text of recent acceptance speeches are also listed in this section. The winners of this year’s awards will be announced at our Online Midsummer Seminar 2023, “Fantasy Goes to Hell,” which runs August 5-6, 2023, on Zoom and Discord.

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

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Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature

• Kelly Barnhill, When Women Were Dragons (Doubleday, 2022)
• Alex Jennings, The Ballad of Perilous Graves (Redhook, 2022)
• Sacha Lamb, When the Angels Left the Old Country (Levine Querido, 2022)
• GennaRose Nethercott, Thistlefoot (Anchor Books, 2022)
• Peng Shepherd, The Cartographers (William Morrow, 2022)

Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature

• Tracy Badua, Freddie vs. the Family Curse (Clarion, 2022)
• Kelly Barnhill, The Ogress and the Orphans (Algonquin Young Readers, 2022)
• Kate DiCamillo, The Beatryce Prophecy (Candlewick Press, 2021)
• Brian Farrey, The Counterclockwise Heart (Algonquin Young Readers, 2022)
• L.D. Lapinski, Strangeworlds Travel Agency trilogy (2021-2022)
• Sofiya Pasternack, Black Bird, Blue Road (Versify, 2022)
• Christina Soontornvat, The Last Mapmaker (Candlewick, 2022)

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies

• Paul S. Fiddes, Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis: Friends in Co-inherence (Oxford University Press, 2021)
• John Garth, The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Places That Inspired Middle-earth (Princeton University Press, 2020)
• Peter Grybauskas, A Sense of Tales Untold: Exploring the Edges of Tolkien’s Literary Canvas (Kent State University Press, 2021)
• Thomas Kullmann and Dirk Siepmann, Tolkien as a Literary Artist (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)
• John Rosegrant, Tolkien, Enchantment, and Loss: Steps on the Developmental Journey (Kent State UP, 2022)

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies

• Brian Attebery, Fantasy: How It Works (Oxford UP, 2022)
• Taylor Driggers, Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)
• Hadas Elber-Aviram, Fairy Tales of London: British Urban Fantasy, 1840 to the Present (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021)
• Daniel Ogden, The Dragon in the West: From Ancient Myth to Modern Legend (Oxford University Press, 2021)
• Matthew Oliver, Magic Words, Magic Worlds: Form and Style in Epic Fantasy (McFarland, 2022)
• Marek Oziewicz, Brian Attebery, and Tereza Dědinová, editors, Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)

The Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature is given to the fantasy novel, multi-volume, or single-author story collection for adults published during 2021 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 (2019–2021) 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 at our Online Midsummer Seminar 2023, “Fantasy Goes to Hell,” which runs August 5-6, 2023, on Zoom and Discord.

A complete list of Mythopoeic Award winners is available on the Society web site: Awards. The finalists for the literature and scholarship awards and text of recent acceptance speeches are also listed in this on-line section.

For more information about the Mythopoeic Awards, please contact the Awards Administrator: , awards@mythsoc.org