The Horror Writers Association has chosen two long-time icons of the genre to receive the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award this year. The award, given for an author’s overall body of work, will go to Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and to F. Paul Wilson.
Yarbro rose to fame with her vampire hero, Count Saint-Germain. She is the first woman ever to receive the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend award. She also was the first woman elected president of the Horror Writers Association. Yarbro’s novels are notable for laying the groundwork for the recent upsurge of “paranormal romance” and trans-genre fiction.
Wilson is best known for his Repairman Jack series of novels, though those are only a part of his more than 40-book canon. In 1979 he won the first Prometheus Award and claimed a Porgie Award in 1984. He won a Bram Stoker Award in 1999 and has been recognized by the American Library Association and the New York Public Library.
Deb LeBlanc, current HWA president, said, “Both of our winners this year have made incredible contributions to the field of dark literature. We are very pleased to add Chelsea and Paul to our roster of LAA recipients.”
The Lifetime Achievement Award is the most prestigious of the Bram Stoker Awards, given by the HWA in acknowledgment of superior achievement not just in a single work but over an entire career. Past Lifetime Achievement Award winners include such noted authors as Stephen King, Anne Rice, Joyce Carol Oates, Ray Bradbury, and Peter Straub. Winners must have exhibited a profound, positive impact on the fields of horror and dark fantasy, and be at least sixty years of age or have been published for a minimum of thirty-five years.
The LAA will be presented as part of the 2009 Stoker Awards Weekend conference to be held June 12-14 at the Burbank Airport Marriott Hotel and Convention Center in Burbank, Calif.
The Horror Writers Association is a worldwide organization promoting dark literature and its creators. Started in 1985, it has over 500 members who are writing professionally in fiction, nonfiction, videogames, films, comics, and other media.
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