Mary Kay Bray Award (Review on HIDDEN WYNDHAM)

Ah .... so, a nice moment just now.

At the awards banquet in Dresden, the Science Fiction Research Association has just granted me their May Kay Bray award for best review published in 2022 by the SFRA Review.

The review itself is on a biography of the SF writer John Wyndham, the guy who did The Day of the Triffids. I'll post my acceptance remarks below -- they'll also be published in the SFRA Review soon -- but if anyone would like to read the review (it's short!), it's online and open-access.

ACCEPTANCE REMARKS
Receiving the Mary Kay Bray Award comes as a huge surprise to me, not to mention a great honor. Normally when one writes a review, you do it as service to the field. They’re a nice break from teaching and heavier types of academic writing, and for myself, at least, I often pick subjects on which I have only passing familiarity. Reviews are therefore good excuses for me to dive into little research tangents, and that’s exactly what happened with Amy Binns’s biography of John Wyndham. Although I had heard of Day of the Triffids and “cozy catastrophes” before, and dimly remembered watching the BBC adaptation of Chocky when I was a small child during the mid-1980s, I actually knew next to nothing about Wyndham himself or his work. So I quickly ordered every novel he’d ever written, and fell in love almost immediately. Nothing could have been better, I thought, than The Midwich Cuckoos … but then I read The Chrysalids. After that, Binns’s excellent biography was simply icing on the cake, and writing the review itself an added bonus.

So, please let me thank the SFRA Executive Committee and everyone who reads for these awards. Having served on awards committees myself, I know the time commitment they entail. Likewise, I’d like to thank Dominick Grace and his excellent work as reviews editor, and also of course Amy Binns, whose biography I whole-heartedly recommend. Thank you all, and your efforts are much appreciated.

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