The Ignyte Awards 2024
Over the past month I've been reading through the nominees for this year's Ignyte Awards. I've blogged about most of them here. Today I submitted my ballot (which you can do here) and I figured I'd write a little bit about my selections.
This is my first year reading the Ignyte list and I found it to be a bit of a mixed bag, especially in the novels. It's not that anything was actively bad, more that the selections this year tended towards things that weren't really to my taste (specifically urban fantasy). But I'm still glad I made the effort, and the books that I liked I really liked. I didn't vote in every category, but here are my picks for the ones I made selections in.
Outstanding Novel - Adult
This was a fairly easy pick when it came down to it. While I really like S.L. Huang's The Water Outlaws I absolutely adored Vajra Chandrasekera's The Saint of Bright Doors. It's been nominated for seemingly everything this year, and with good reason. This is a stunning debut and I'm very excited to read the rest of Chandrasekera's work.
Outstanding Novella
Trying to pick a favourite between A.Z. Louise's Off-Time Jive and Tiffany Morris' Green Fuse Burning - both of which are fantastic - was very, very difficult. My instinct was to lean towards Off-Time Jive but on reflection I think that's mostly recency bias talking, as I read Green Fuse Burning a couple of months ago. But Morris' novella has lingered in my mind in a way that Off-Time Jive hasn't, despite how much I enjoyed it, so in the end I went with swamp horror over noir time travel.
Outstanding Novelette
I haven't blogged about the short fiction categories in the same way that I've been writing about the novels and novellas, but the selections in both the novelette and short story categories were fantastic. Here I'm giving my vote to Eboni J. Dunbar's Spell for Grief and Longing from issue #26 of Fiyah. I liked the majority of the list here, but this is the one that I immediately loved the most. It's warm and tender and tense, the characters are complex and fully realised in a very small amount of space, and it tells a full story that wraps itself up nicely. The writing is understated but gorgeous, and I found myself wanting to spend much more time in this world with these characters.
Outstanding Short Story
On the surface, Kemi Ashing-Giwa's Thin Ice feels like it's about AI "art" and the way these "services" chop up actual art and stitch it back together into meaningless chimera while their advocates congratulate themselves for being so creative. But it also feels like it's about how colonial powers take culture that isn't theirs and repackage them, too. Generative art, it says, is just a method of taking colonialism online. I really loved this and while the rest of the category was strong, this was probably the easiest pick of all for me.
Oustanding in Speculative Poetry
I'm not a poet, and I have nothing of value to say about poetry (not that I have anything of value to say about fiction either, really, but here we are). I've voted for Alternate Rooms by Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan simply because it's the one that stood out to me the most.
Outstanding Artist
Another tough category, but my vote went to Rovina Cai. Her style is very "classic illustration", which is something I really enjoy, but there's a ton of personality and a modern twist to it that I love.
This blog doesn't have a comments section, by design. If you want to chat about any of the posts here, drop me an email at chris @ loottheroom dot uk.