Tender Morsels Wins World Fantasy Award

I wrote about Tender Morsels three months ago in my post about the Nominees for the 2009 World Fantasy Awards. Now the award has been announced and Tender Morsels is the winner. It is actually the joint winner with Jeffrey Ford's The Shadow Year.

You can read more about it here: Controversial teenage novel wins World Fantasy awardMargo Lanagan's Tender Morsels, described as 'sordid wretchedness' in the Daily Mail, takes joint prize with Jeffrey Ford's The Shadow Year. Here's an excerpt from the great article:

She was inspired to write Tender Morsels, she said, "when something down in my guts responded to the way the Grimm brothers had changed Caroline Stahl's story when they rewrote it". "I was annoyed with the moral message they forced the story to carry," she said. "Although my novel doesn't necessarily offer any more hope for the women characters than theirs does, at least it's less adamant than Snow White and Rose Red that the women's oppression is a good and necessary thing."

A book, she believes, is "perhaps the safest, the least confronting form" in which to explore tough stories, as it is much easier to decide to put down or take up an uncomfortable tale in a book, than it is to reject one on television or in a cinema. "If a young person (or an adult) is not ready, or not 'in the mood', for a particular story, or they need to pause in the reading, or even stop altogether, with a book they can pause, or stop, and no one else need see, know or comment," she said.

There's a full list of nominees and winners on Locus Mag and you can learn more about the 2009 World Fantasy Convention and Awards on their site.