Friday, 8 November saw the presentation of the fifth annual Ignyte Awards. Originally attached to the virtual convention FIYAHCON, these awards, which celebrate science fiction, fantasy, and horror by diverse creators, have continued to take place every year despite the convention being on hiatus since 2021. Here are the highlights of the 2024 Ignyte Awards.
One of the works honoured was The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera which won in the category for adult novels. Re-inventing the concept of urban fantasy from the ground up, Chandrasekera’s novel previously won both a Nebula and Locus Award.
The Ignytes also have two categories for novels geared toward younger readers. Jamison Shae’s I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me, the story of a ballet dancer’s Faustian pact, won the Young Adult award; Abeni’s Song by P. Djèlí Clark, the first novel in a series inspired by West African folklore, took the Middle Grade prize, marking Clark’s third Ignyte Award.
Moving on to the categories for shorter fiction, Moses Ose Utomi won the Outstanding Novella Award for The Lies of the Ajungo, another first volume in a series of African fantasy adventures. Eboni J. Dunbar took the Outstanding Novelette award with “Spell for Grief and Longing” from issue #26 of FIYAH, in which a ruler hires a magic-user for a sacrilegious task: raising the dead. The title of Outstanding Short Story went to “A Witch’s Transition In The City Of Ghosts” by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe which tells the tale of forbidden love between a forest spirit and a transgender witch. The winner in the category for Outstanding Anthology/Collected Works was No One Will Come Back for Us, a collection of 17 short stories by Premee Mohamed.
Ethan S. Parker, Griffin Sheridan, and Bob Quinn were named the year’s Outstanding Comics Team for their work on Kill Your Darlings. The other finalists in this category were the respective teams behind Whisper of the Woods, Brooms, Mage and the Endless Unknown, and Suee and the Strange White Light.
LeVar Burton Reads won the title of Outstanding Fiction Podcast for the second time, having previously claimed this award in 2020. Also in the running were PodCastle, Old Gods of Appalachia, Cast of Wonders, and Simultaneous Times Podcast. The award for Outstanding Artist went to Rovina Cai, whose illustrations include book covers and Magic: The Gathering cards. The runners-up in this category were Cathy Kwan, Paul Lewin, Godwin Akpan, and Dante Luiz.
The Ignyte Awards, a relatively new addition to the SFF awards scene, stand out from the crowd in part by including categories that many established prizes ignore. The award for Outstanding speculative Poetry went to “My Mother, she ate me” by Akua Lezli Hope; published in issue #25 of FIYAH, this uses the motif of shapeshifting to explore the theme of controlling parenthood. The title of Outstanding Creative Nonfiction went to Lysz Flo’s essay: “The Magic is in the Roots: Cultural Reconnection Through Magical Realism,” which also appeared in FIYAH #25 and takes the topic of Haitian folk-beliefs as a jumping-off point to examine Afro-Caribbean contributions to magical realism. Aside from Maya Gittelman’s essay on the Oscars’ failure to recognise Stephanie Hsu’s performance in Everything Everywhere All at Once, all of the runners-up in this category discuss aspects of the horror genre.
Locus contributor Alex Brown won the Critics Award ahead of fellow finalists Aigner Loren Wilson, Archita Mittra, Bookbaddiebri, and The Blerd Library. Brown had previously won the award in 2020. The Ember Award, which honours unsung contributions to SFF, went to Sheree Renée Thomas, a writer, artist, and anthologist who has also been editing The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction since 2021. Other candidates for this honour were the writers DeVaun Sanders, Kate Elliott, Kwame Mbalia, and A.C. Wise.
Finally, the Community Award for Outstanding Efforts in Service of Inclusion and Equitable Practice in Genre went to the team behind khōréō, a quarterly magazine that celebrates speculative fiction by immigrant and diaspora writers. The runners-up here are an eclectic mix consisting of the Voodoonauts Summer Fellowship initiative, Sarah Gailey’s food-based “Stone Soup” essay series, Samovar Magazine, and the Awesome Black Foundation.
A full list of finalists can be found here.
Note: The original version of this post contained an inaccurate description of Maya Gittelman’s essay; the error has now been fixed.
