Down with the racist Lovecraft! The world fantasy award, new design

In the West there is some really authoritative literary awards, whose results are at least interesting reading community. In fiction is “Hugo” and “nebula”, a horror award named after Bram Stoker, and in fantasy, oddly enough, the world fantasy award. The latter has been awarded since 1975, the award itself all this time was a distorted and slightly creepy bust of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Yes, the recluse from Providence is considered the founder of not only Lovecraftian horror, and his impact on the world of fantastic literature it’s hard not to recognize.

Now, the statue with grotesque Howard our Phillips were awarded to the winners of the World Fantasy Award for forty years, but in recent years, Lovecraft has fallen out of favor. For some reason now some friends became concerned about his far from politically correct views. Spit that times have really changed; spit on the merits to the genre; racist and anti-Semite cannot be a person of literary prizes.

American writer of Nigerian origin , Nnedi Okorafor, who won the WFA in 2011 with the novel “Who Fears Death”, said that this award is one of the most important in her career. But when she constantly runs into the face of “rabid racist” on the shelf with the awards, it’s very strange… all went the traditional way: complaints, petitions, offended cries from the darkness. And then the cowardly decision of the organizers of the award change. What’s really weird is the fact that none of the masters for Lauretta not really stood up. And someone, like the writer, compiler of anthologies and a connoisseur of “wird” Jeff vandermeer state, even publicly rejoiced that the father of the Cthulhu Mythos will no longer be the face of fantasy.

Most confident: the reason for the change of design only in the views Lauretta. The famous literary critic and biographer S. T. Joshi walked according to the organizers, “pandering to a handful of whiners and fighters for political correctness” has refused two of premiums received and even urged his colleagues to boycott the World Fantasy Convention, where awards are given. Among the official reasons for the replacement of figurines called the desire to escape from the personification of the prize (supposedly there are still copyrights involved), they say, it should not remind anyone of the writers, and, ideally, its image must reflect all sub-genres of fantasy: classic fantasy, magic realism, horror and so on. Apparently, according to the administration does meet these criteria new award in the form of a twisted tree on a background of the moon (that same moon?). The author was the artist and sculptor Vincent Villafranca. For the first time updated the prizes will be awarded in November this year in San Antonio.

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