Stoker Award Hat Trick

An amazing thing happened last night: RDSP books took home 3 Bram Stoker awards proving that even after a year of “unprecedented” we still have the capability of being stunned. It was an exciting kick off to see Christina Sng win a second Stoker for poetry with A Collection of Dreamscapes at the very beginning of the awards.

Watch Christina Sng’s moving acceptance speech

We had barely caught our breath when Tim Waggoner received the Stoker for Short Non-Fiction with an article published in The Writer, though we didn’t publish the piece it came out of Tim’s work on Writing in the Dark (which we did publish) so that was cool. However, it made us extra surprised when, about 20, minutes later, Tim ALSO won the Stoker for Non-Fiction with the aforementioned Writing in the Dark! 

Watch Tim Waggoner’s acceptance speech

By this time we were in full celebration mode. We were lucky that the Atlanta chapter of the HWA allowed us to crash their virtual party and really didn’t think much when Jeff Strand went off camera. Soon he turned up on the show to present for debut novel and when he announced that EV Knight won we jumped out of our seats. Although we couldn’t be in person it was so special to be able to see EV’s face (on screen) for this special moment. Huge thanks go out to Lynne Hansen for making that possible!

EV Knight’s acceptance speech was pretty hilarious. Watch it here.

3 out of 4 is not only not bad. It’s pretty great actually! While Steven Archer’s illustrated adaptation of The Masque of the Red Death did not win a Stoker it did enable us to compete in a category we’ve never been in before and Archer’s artwork also appears on the cover of A Collection of Dreamscapes so he continues to make us look good.

But that wasn’t the end of it! Lee Murray won her first Stoker for her collection Grotesque: Monster Stories published by Things in the Well and though we had no hand in it we certainly cheered her on. On top of that we got to see Lee win a second time along with Geneve Flynn received the Stoker for their ground-breaking anthology of Asian horror Black Cranes: Tales of Unquiet Women published by Omnium Gatherum Media. This was definitely one of the most important works published in 2020 and it was fantastic to see it recognized.

All in all it was an amazing night but it also represents the culmination of a year’s worth of work and we certainly didn’t get to this point without a lot of help. Stephanie M. Wytovich edited A Collection of Dreamscapes and continues to be the guiding light for our poetry line. D. Harlan Wilson, editor for our non-fiction imprint Guide Dog Books, was invaluable in the editing and production of Writing in the Dark. Behind the scenes publicist Erin Sweet Al-Mehairi worked doggedly to get the word out about all these releases and more and she joins us in thanking all the reviewers, bookstagrammers, blurbers and podcasters for supporting our releases.