2009 Shirley Jackson Award Winners Announced

For many horror writers and editors, the Bram Stoker Awards have remained the standard for award-winning Horror fiction and literature. That is until last year in 2008 when the Shirley Jackson Awards were first announced for “outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic”.

This year’s award was presented on Sunday, July 12th 2009 at Readercon, the Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Burlington, Massachusetts. Elizabeth Hand, Readercon Guest of Honor, and author of Generation Loss, which won the 2007 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel, will act as host.

Shirley Jackson is probably best known for her story story “The Lottery” published in a 1948 issue of the New Yorker. She is also known for her paranomral/gothic novels that established much of the horror genre we know today.

The winners are listed below:

Novel: The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford (published by William Morrow)
Novella: Disquiet by Julia Leigh (Penguin)
Novelette: “Pride and Prometheus” by John Kessel (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction)
Short Story: “The Pile” by Michael Bishop (Subterranean Online)
Collection: The Diving Pool by Yoko Ogawa (Picador)
Anthology: The New Uncanny edited by Sarah Eyre and Ra Page (Comma Press)