Using Awards Lists As a RA Tool: Shirley Jackson Awards Edition

This is part of my ongoing series on using Awards Lists as a RA tool. Click here for all posts in the series in reverse chronological order. Click here for the first post which outlines the details how to use awards lists as a RA tool.

The Shirley Jackson Awards were announced over the weekend. You can go to the website to see the winners, get access to past winners and nominees, and even watch the announcement of the winners.

I have also listed the winners below for the lazy among you who don't click through.

The Shirley Jackson Awards are an excellent RA tool not only for the normal reasons I outline with the links to start this post, but also because they are an award that is NOT bound by genre. The entire point of the books that are nominated for and win this award is that they represent the legacy of Jackson, herself. Books that are darkly speculative and/or are intensely psychological; books that defy conventions but are great.  Each and every year titles are honored that are amazing reads but are almost always overlooked by genre awards, not because they aren't great [because they are], but because when push comes to shove, they do not fit as easily into the genre box as the other options.

Also, because books that win the Shirley Jackson award already live on the fringes, the jurors and the titles they choose are more diverse than your average award.

A perfect example of all of these points is the best novella winner, Ormeshadow by Priya Sharma. I read this novella last year and was blown away by it. A captivating story that reminded by of Naomi Novik, a dark fantasy-horror hybrid. I chose it to lead off my October take over of  Neal  Wyatt's Readers' Shelf column last October, precisely because it perfectly filled the space in the Venn diagram where dark fantasy and horror overlap. I know it was a title library workers may have missed, while I also knew patrons would love it.

I also asked Ms Sharma to share why she loves horror with my readers on the horror blog. You can read her guest post here.

I am familiar with every one of the authors and titles listed here. I was especially excited to see Indrapramit Das win. I highlighted him in my review of Ellen Datlow's award winning Anthology Echoes last year. This is a different story, but I loved it. I am going to seek out the story listed below immediately.

And the anthology by Golden and Moore is so deserving of praise. It lost out to the aforementioned ECHOES at the Stokers for the exact reasons I mentioned above. As a voter for the Stokers, I was choosing between those two for my final vote and ultimately, I could not ignore the Datlow collection as more HORROR from top to bottom.

But Golden and Moore created The Twisted Book of Shadows to  prove  a point, that they  could use a blind submission process, get a diverse group of authors, many whose names might not be known, pay everyone pro rates, and still create a top notch anthology. And guess what, they did it, earning multiple speculate fiction award nominations and now a win!

Please see the winners below and go to the website to get access to hundreds of title to build virtual and in-person displays of past nominees and winners. Add them to your carts and get these books on your shelves. Jackson is extremely popular with readers right now [for many reasons, but most recently this new movie]. The chance to make a diverse display with high-interest titles is a click away. Don't miss out.

2019 Shirley Jackson Awards Winners

Boston, MA (July, 2020) — In recognition of the legacy of Shirley Jackson’s writing, and with permission of the author’s estate, The Shirley Jackson Awards, Inc. has been established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.

The Shirley Jackson Awards are voted upon by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics. The awards are given for the best work published in the preceding calendar year in the following categories:  Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Story, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology.

The 2019 Shirley Jackson Awards were premiered on Sunday, July 12, 2020, as a pre-recorded ceremony. The winners of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Awards are:

 

NOVEL

The Book of X, Sarah Rose Etter (Two Dollar Radio)

NOVELLA

Ormeshadow, Priya Sharma (Tor.com)

NOVELETTE

Luminous Body, Brooke Warra (Dim Shores)

SHORT FICTION

“Kali_Na,” Indrapramit Das (The Mythic Dream)

SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION

Song for the Unraveling of the World, Brian Evenson (Coffee House Press)

EDITED ANTHOLOGY

The Twisted Book of Shadows, edited by Christopher Golden & James A. Moore (Twisted Publishing)

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) wrote such classic novels as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as one of the most famous short stories in the English language, “The Lottery.”  Her work continues to be a major influence on writers of every kind of fiction, from the most traditional genre offerings to the most innovative literary work.