2008 Mythopoeic Awards - Finalists

[talkstowolves]

Last week, the Mythopoeic Society announced the finalists for this year's Mythopoeic Awards. You can find out who the finalists are by going to the relevant page or you can see the list below the cut:

Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature

Theodora Goss, In the Forest of Forgetting (Prime Books)
Nalo Hopkinson, The New Moon’s Arms (Grand Central Publishing)
Guy Gavriel Kay, Ysabel (Roc)
Catherynne M. Valente, Orphan’s Tales, consisting of In the Night Garden (Spectra) and In the Cities of Coin and Spice (Spectra)
John C. Wright, Chronicles of Chaos, consisting of Orphans of Chaos (Tor); Fugitives of Chaos (Tor), and Titans of Chaos (Tor)

Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature

Holly Black, Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale (Simon & Schuster); Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie (Simon & Schuster); Ironside: A Modern Faery’s Tale (Margaret K. McElderry)
Derek Landy, Skulduggery Pleasant (HarperCollins)
J.K. Rowling, The Harry Potter series, consisting of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s [Sorcerer’s] Stone (Bloomsbury); Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Bloomsbury); Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Bloomsbury); Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Bloomsbury); Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Bloomsbury); Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Bloomsbury); and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Bloomsbury)
Nancy Springer, Dusssie (Walker Books for Young Readers)
Kate Thompson, The New Policeman (HarperTeen)

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies

Marjorie Burns, Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth (University of Toronto Press, 2005)
Verlyn Flieger, Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology (Kent State University Press, 2005)
Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Weiner, The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2006)
Diana Pavlac Glyer; appendix by David Bratman, The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community (Kent State University Press, 2007)
John D. Rateliff, The History of the Hobbit, Part One, Mr Baggins; Part Two, Return to Bag-End (HarperCollins, 2007)

Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies

Charles Butler, Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children’s Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper (Children’s Literature Association & Scarecrow Press, 2006)
Heather O’Donoghue, From Asgard to Valhalla: The Remarkable History of the Norse Myths (I.B. Tauris, 2007)
T.A. Shippey, editor, The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm’s Mythology of the Monstrous (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005)
Richard Carl Tuerk, Oz in Perspective: The Magic and Myth of the L. Frank Baum Books (McFarland & Co., 2007)
Milly Williamson, The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy (Wallflower, 2006)

Note: Just for kicks, I have bolded the ones that I have read and italicized the ones that I've been wanting to read.

I would now discourse knowledgeably on the finalists and predict who would win in each category, but I can't. I just haven't read all these books and don't have the experience to make any well-founded predictions.

However, just for fun, I will put my totally random predictions as a comment to this entry. I invite you to do the same!

P.S. A possible note of interest for those who are interested in past Mythopoeic Award-winners and like random reading projects: the Foxy Writer has started a Mythopoeic Awards Reading Challenge, which sounds brilliant to me. (Mostly because it has tons of books on there that I've been wanting to read anyway! This gives me a good excuse to move them up in the to-read pile.)

P.P.S. And for those who were wondering, the winners will be announced during Mythcon XXXIX (held August 15-18, 2008).

Comments

Predictions!

[talkstowolves.livejournal.com]

My totally random and hardly informed predictions for the winners:

For adult literature, I'm going to go with yuki_onna's Orphan's Tales because they are gorgeous and worthy and a wonder to behold.

For children's literature, I'd like to go with blackholly's Faerie series, but they've got JKR's juggernaut on the ballot this year. HP just had a wider-spread effect than the Faerie books. So, Harry for the win.

For the Inklings Studies, I have no idea! But do you think that's going to stop me? Ha! I choose you, Diana Pavlac Glyer!

For the final scholarship award, I am going to pick the one that sounds most interesting to me... so, T.A. Shippey's book will be the winner, if you please. Or so I predict. ;) Probably badly.

[penmage.livejournal.com]

Oooh. You should also want to read Kate Thompson's The New Policeman, which is a joyful wonderful gorgeous teen novel that I loved like crazy.