Nov 13, 2015 07:00 AM EST
HP Lovecraft Biographer ST Joshi Returns World Fantasy Awards in Protest

ST Joshi may have won World Fantasy awards but he isn't happy they are no longer modelled in the late horror fiction writer HP Lovecraft. Joshi is the author's biographer. According to The Guardian, he has returned his trophies to the accolade's organizers World Fantasy Convention.

Joshi specifically gave them back to the co-chairman of the organization David Hartwell in protest of ditching Lovecraft, which was made possible after author Daniel José Older campaigned for a year to remove the "avowed racist" as the face of the awards.

Older's petition has invited other individuals one in the goal. One of which is World Fantasy Award winner Nnedi Okorafor, who has "conflicted" feelings about the award when she knew about Lovecraft's racist tendencies in a poem he wrote in 1912 titled "On the Creation of Niggers," where Lovecraft  reduced the subject of his work as a "thing" and "a beast ... in semi-human figure."

But, Joshi believes that this is merely an attack on the author and that the World Fantasy Convention giving in to the complaint makes it more unacceptable.  The awards he won are now "irremediably tainted" and in turn, he wishes not to see them in his shelf again and opted to return them.

"Evidently, this move was meant to placate the shrill whining of a handful of social justice warriors who believe that a 'vicious racist' like Lovecraft has no business being honoured by such an award," Joshi, who is "deeply disappointed about the decision, wrote in his blog.

For the biographer, the move is nothing but "a craven yielding to the worst sort of political correctness and an explicit acceptance of the crude, ignorant and tendentious slanders against Lovecraft propagated by a small but noisy band of agitators."

Joshi also made it a point to remind Hartwell not to nominate them for any prize in the World Fantasy awards. He also made it clear that he will no longer involve himself in the accolade the way the organization cut its involvement with Lovecraft.

"I will never attend another World Fantasy Convention as long as I live," he wrote in the letter, he will do "everything in my power to urge a boycott of the World Fantasy Convention among my many friends and colleagues."

Joshi bagged two World Fantasy awards for his work "Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction" and "Volumes One and Two." He also received a special award for scholarship. 

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