Sophie White and Gabino Iglesias win Shirley Jackson Award
Sophie White has won this year’s Shirley Jackson Award for her novel Where I End, in a tie with The Devil Takes You Home, by Gabino Iglesias (Mulholland Books).
The Awards were presented on Saturday, July 15th at Readercon 32, Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Quincy, Massachusetts.
The awards recognise “outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic” and are voted on by writers, critics, editors, and academics. Previous winners include Stephen King and Carmen Maria Machado.
Reviewing Where I end for Books Ireland, Claire Hennessy said that “White wants the reader to squirm, to be uncomfortable, to re-see the female body, the mothering body. She succeeds.”
THE WINNERS
NOVEL (Tie)
The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias (Mulholland Books).
Where I End by Sophie White (Tramp Press).
NOVELLA
The Bone Lantern by Angela Slatter (PS Publishing).
NOVELETTE
What the Dead Know by Nghi Vo (Amazon Original Stories).
SHORT FICTION
“Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867” by Kim Fu (Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century).
SINGLE-AUTHOR COLLECTION
We Are Here to Hurt Each Other by Paula D. Ashe (Nictitating Books).
EDITED ANTHOLOGY
The Hideous Book of Hidden Horrors, edited by Doug Murano (Bad Hand Books).
A writer and host of the comedy podcasts Mother of Pod and The Creep Dive, Sophie White’s fifth book, the memoir Corpsing: My Body and Other Horror Shows (Tramp Press, 2021), was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award and the Michel Déon Prize for non-fiction.
Writing on White’s latest novel, My Hot Friend (Hachette), Laura King praised White’s ability to write across very different genres.
“I admire how she can use the language and structure of those varied genres to speak to what are sometimes quite similar ideas; influencer culture, mental illness, relationships, and the body – and allow us to access her way of seeing the same world through different portals.”
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and literary critic living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of the award-winning novels Zero Saints and Coyote Songs, and his fiction has appeared in The New York Times.
The Devil Takes You Home has been described as a panoramic odyssey for fans of S.A. Cosby’s southern noir, Blacktop Wasteland, by way of the boundary-defying storytelling of Stephen Graham Jones and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
It was named a best book of the year by Harper’s Bazaar, The Chicago Tribune, and Oprah Daily.
