I’ve just done a post over at SFAW about the brand new David Gemmell Legend Award for Fantasy, an award for fantasy novels of truly heroic stature. I suspect that will make a whole bunch of people very happy. There are folks who are always moaning that heroic fantasy never gets a fair whack in the Hugos or World Fantasy Awards. Well this is an award for them.

The mechanism is also quite interesting. Essentially what they have done is take the structure of a juried award, but farm out the job of reading the long list and narrowing it down to a short list to the general public. A jury still gets to pick the winner, but a lot of the hard work for that jury (in reading a whole bunch of submitted works that are not up to scratch) is removed.

If you happen to be a fantasy novel editor and have not been asked to nominate works yet, I suggest you get in touch with Debbie Miller, the award administrator.