The Carl Brandon Society has announced that it is bringing back its two major prizes, the Carl Brandon Parallax and Kindred Awards, after a lengthy absence. The awards will honor the “best speculative fiction created by a self-identified person of color” and the work of speculative fiction that “best explores and expands our understanding of race” published in the preceding calendar year.
The organization will accept nominations for both awards through April 15th, 2020. According to the society, the recipients of the award will get an award plaque, $1000, and will be invited to the awards ceremony.
The juried awards were instituted in 2006 and were awarded through 2011. That last pair of winners include Tenea D. Johnson and Andrea Hairston, who earned the Parallax and Kindred awards for their novels Smokedown and Wildfire, respectively. Other recipients of the prizes include Karen Lord, Nnedi Okorafor, Hiromi Goto, Justine Larbalestier, Vandana Singh, Tananarive Due, Minister Faust, and Walter Mosley.
The Carl Brandon Society is a nonprofit organization that was founded in 1999 at WisCon in Madison, Wisconsin, in response to an article by Samuel R. Delany, “Racism and Science Fiction.” Its mission is to increase “racial and ethnic diversity in the production of and audience for speculative fiction.” It also administers the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund.
