The new World Fantasy Award helps push back against H.P. Lovecraft’s toxic legacy

There are several huge awards in the speculative-fiction community: science fiction has the Hugos and Nebulas, and fantasy literature has the World Fantasy Award. The WFAs have been handed out at the World Fantasy Convention since 1975, but this year, there’ll be a big change. From its inception in 1975, the award has been a bust of horror author H.P. Lovecraft, designed by cartoonist Gahan Wilson. But this year, the award has been replaced in favor of a design featuring a twisted tree.

Lovecraft has fallen out of favor in recent years, coinciding with an intense focus on his racism, anti-Semitism, and vocal contempt for religion. In 2011, Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor (who wrote the fantastic Binti novellas) won the World Fantasy Award for her novel Who Fears Death. A couple of years later, a friend of hers was taken aback when he saw the award displayed in her home, and he pointed out a horrific poem Lovecraft had written a century earlier: On the Creation of Niggers. Okorafor wrote about her reaction and realization of the depths of the author’s racism.

Okorafor’s blog post kicked off a firestorm of soul-searching within the speculative-fiction community. She noted that she wanted a public discussion on the issue: “what I know I want is to face the history of this leg of literature rather than put it aside or bury it. If this is how some of the great minds of speculative fiction felt, then let’s deal with that… as opposed to never mention it or explain it away.”

There’s no doubt that Lovecraft’s body of work has had a profound influence on fantasy and horror fiction, but the community questioned whether it should make its public face someone who embodied such hate. Other commenters wanted to continue to recognize Lovecraft’s legacy as a writer, while condemning his views. Shortly thereafter, the board of the World Fantasy Awards began to discuss their options: should they replace the statue, and if so, with what? Fantasy author Daniel José Older put together a petition calling for the award to be replaced with an image of author Octavia Butler, noting that “after decades and decades of deeply embedded racism being prevalent in the fantasy genre, it’s time to make courageous moves against racism, and that includes not championing a vile racist.”

Ultimately, the administrators of the award opted to drop Lovecraft’s likeness. Older later told The Guardian that he was pleased, saying that if fantasy literature wanted to be collectively open to all fans, the community “can’t keep lionising a man who used literature as a weapon against entire races. Writers of colour have always had to struggle with the question of how to love a genre that seems so intent on proving it doesn’t love us back.”

The new design — the winner of a yearlong public design contest — comes from sculptor and artist Vincent Villafranca, which the award administrators noted covers all branches of the fantasy genre, from “horror to high fantasy and all stops in between.” The new award will be issued for the first time during this year’s World Fantasy Convention, held in San Antonio, Texas from November 2nd through the 5th. Nominations for the award will come later this summer.