Daryl Gregory wins Shirley Jackson novella award

Snubbed. Overlooked. Passed over. Ignored. Crash and burn. Disrespected. Insulted. Shunned. Neglected. Ostracised. Scorned. Rebuffed. Upstaged. Blackballed. Thrown shade.  I did not win the Shirley Jackson Award for best novella.

The honour went to Daryl Greogry for We Are All Completely Fine, which is a fantastic, challenging novella that has spawned a spin-off.  You can read what I thought of it, and the other nominees in my category, in my post Four Reasons Why I Probably Won’t Win The Shirley Jackson Award, published a few weeks ago.
The awards were announced at Readercon 26 in Burlington, MA.   Locus Magazine has a list of all the winners and nominees, including of course my also-ran The Good Shabti.

Schroedinger’s Shirley


In the hours leading up to the award announcement, there was plenty of good-luck-wishing on social media, indulged in by yrstrly as much as anyone.  But that’s not how awards work.   While (for example) the Djokovic vs Federer tennis final could have gone either way on Sunday, the winners of the Shirley Jackson Awards were decided well before any of us began tweeting! No amount of luck, no furious flapping of a butterflies wings, could have changed the result.  Daryl Gregory was always the winner.  That fact of the universe existed well before the announcement on Sunday.  And yet, because the news was embargoed, the potential for other winners still seemed to exist.  Inside the envelope was a Shroedinger’s Shirley, five possible potential winners.  Perhaps in some other universe, the quantum particles span a little different in the minds of the judges, and yrstrly is lording over everyone right now.  Or perhaps Daryl’s story has a certain property of Shirleyness to it that means he is the winner in every corner of the multiverse.

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