Karen Lord has been named the winner of this year’s William L. Crawford Award for her first novel Redemption in Indigo (Small Beer Press). The award, presented annually at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, is designated for a new writer whose first fantasy book appeared the previous year. This year’s conference will be March 16-20 in Orlando, FL.
The nominators for this year’s award also shortlisted Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City, N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and Anna Kendall’s Crossing Over, and wanted to commend two other novels, Robert Jackson Bennett’s Mr. Shivers and Amelia Beamer’s The Loving Dead, the latter of which was viewed by some nominators as centrally a science fiction work. Science fiction is excluded under the terms established by the award’s founding sponsor, Andre Norton.
Those participating, in varying degrees, in this year’s nomination and selection process included Niall Harrison, Cheryl Morgan, Graham Sleight, Paul Witcover, John Clute, Jonathan Strahan, Liza Trombi, Farah Mendlesohn, Ellen Klages, and Kelly Link (who, as publisher of Small Beer Press, recused herself from final voting).