SFWA Grand Master Award

Tagged: Award

A lifetime achievement Award presented to living authors (only) by the Nebula Committee of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, as part of the annual Nebula Awards presentation for work appearing in the previous year. The Grand Master Award was inaugurated in 1975, when the first presentation was made to Robert A Heinlein. In theory this honour is awarded only from time to time, but since 1995 it has become rare for a year to be skipped. It goes always to writers who are senior in both status and years. Since 2002 it has been formally known as the Damon Knight Grand Master Award.

Also listed below are further SFWA life-achievement honours. Author Emeritus awards were introduced in 1995 for, apparently, long-time sf writers not considered worthy of Grand Master eminence; in 2004 this briefly became the more tactful Author of Distinction. Some controversy ensued when Robert Sheckley, then by no means retired from writing, was named as Author Emeritus in 2001. Both Grand Master and Author Emeritus are now normally announced well in advance of the Nebulas: for example, the 2009 winners were both released in Summer 2008, in which year the term "Author Emerita" was introduced for the lesser honour's fourth female recipient. The Solstice Award for life achievement – which unlike Grand Master and Author Emeritus/Emerita may be presented to deceased as well as living recipients, and to anthologists, artists, critics and publishers as well as authors – was added in 2009. In that year, the one-off Ray Bradbury Award for achievement in genre drama was also presented. The 2014 non-Grand Master career award, generally assumed to be equivalent to Author Emeritus, was termed "Special Honoree".

In all listings below, the years given are the years of the actual award presentations, whether in the past or (owing to pre-announcement) forthcoming. [DRL]

Grand Master

Author Emeritus

  • 1995: Emil Petaja
  • 1996: Wilson Tucker
  • 1997: Judith Merril
  • 1998: Nelson Bond
  • 1999: William Tenn
  • 2000: Daniel Keyes
  • 2001: Robert Sheckley
  • 2002: not awarded
  • 2003: Katherine MacLean
  • 2004: Charles L Harness (as "Author of Distinction")
  • 2005: not awarded
  • 2006: William F Nolan
  • 2007: D G Compton
  • 2008: Ardath Mayhar
  • 2009: M J Engh ("Author Emerita")
  • 2010: Neal Barrett Jr
  • 2014: Frank M Robinson ("Special Honoree") – a presentation intended for the 2014 Nebula ceremony, which through organizational error was not made; it is to be presented in 2015 and may be counted among that year's awards.

Solstice Award

Ray Bradbury Award

This was given only once, as below, as an award for overall career achievement. For SFWA presentations to individual dramatic works and/or their scripts, see Nebula.

links

Previous versions of this entry

Website design and build: STEEL

Site ©2011 Gollancz, SFE content ©2011 SFE Ltd.
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/sfwa_grand_master_award
www.sf-encyclopedia.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-18
31574
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:XBSFOUZD66ZQ7AB7ATQMBUKXISUQXW3R
<urn:uuid:0f241abc-6056-4d80-aadb-f7aab7578aa3>
2015-04-28T14:25:16Z
89.187.123.116
sha1:2L4BADB2LDUDCA3RSATCB5H3M6S6Z4H3
<urn:uuid:39e2b698-3d26-48dd-8def-e93a31b9f3a0>
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/sfwa_grand_master_award
response
<urn:uuid:d0b39d61-c73e-429c-a954-cf361d12aae9>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-235-10-82.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-18
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for April 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf