World Fantasy Awards 2020 finalists announced.

Kacen Callender, Rivers Solomon, Nisi Shawl, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, and Sheree Renée Thomas are finalists for the World Fantasy Awards 2020 announced on July 27, 2020.

The World Fantasy Awards have been awarded annually for the best fantasy fiction published during the previous calendar year, organized and overseen by the World Fantasy Convention, since 1975.

The awards for 2020 are in novel, novella, short fiction, anthology, collection and artist as well as special awards for professionals and non-professionals. Doing the judging duties are Gwenda Bond, Galen Dara, Michael Kelly, Victor LaValle, and Adam Roberts. This panel has announced the finalists for the awards this year and there are some Black people in the running in the different categories. They are Kacen Callender, Rivers Solomon, and Nisi Shawl in the novel, novella, and anthology categories. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas and Sheree Renée Thomas have been nominated in the special award for professionals.

Here are the nominees in their categories;

Novel

• Queen of the Conquered, by Kacen Callender (Orbit)
• The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow (Redhook Books/Orbit UK)
• The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie (Orbit)
• Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir (Tor.com)
• The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa (trans.Stephen Snyder) (Pantheon/Harvill Secker)

Novella

• The Butcher’s Table, by Nathan Ballingrud (Wounds: Six Stories From the Border of Hell)
• Desdemona and the Deep, by C.S.E. Cooney (Tor.com)
• In an Absent Dream, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com)
• The Deep, by Rivers Solomon with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes (Saga Press/Hodder & Stoughton UK)
• Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh (Tor.com)

Short Fiction

• For He Can Creep, by Siobhan Carroll (Tor.com, July 10, 2019)
• Read After Burning, by Maria Dahvana Headley, (A People’s Future of the United States)
• The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye, by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, July-Aug. 2019)
• Blood is Another Word For Hunger, by Rivers Solomon (Tor.com, July 24, 2019)
• Postlude to the Afternoon of a Faun, by Jerome Stueart (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Mar./Apr. 2019)
• Everyone Knows That They‘re Dead. Do You?, by Genevieve Valentine (The Outcast Hours)

Anthology

• Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, edited by Ellen Datlow (Saga Press)
• The Outcast Hours, edited by Mahvesh Murad & Jared Shurin (Solaris)
• The Mythic Dream, edited by Dominik Parisien & Navah Wolfe (Saga Press)
• New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, edited by Nisi Shawl (Solaris)
• The Big Book of Classic Fantasy, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (Vintage Books)

Special Award – Professional

• C. Finlay, for F&SF editing Leslie Klinger, for The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft: Beyond Arkham (Liveright)
• Ellen Oh, for We Need Diverse Books
• Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, for The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (New York University Press)
• Sheree Renée Thomas, for contributions to the genre

The winners of the awards will be announced at the World Fantasy Convention which happens from October 29 – November 1.