From the Boston Book Festival: The Shirley Jackson Awards Celebrate the Uncanny

On Saturday, Oct. 29, enthusiastic bibliophiles gathered at the Boston Book Festival for the 15th annual presentation of The Shirley Jackson Awards. Aptly held in the waning days of this spooky season, the awards recognize outstanding achievement in horror, the dark fantastic, and psychological suspense in six literary categories.

Co-hosted by horror authors Paul G. Tremblay and Elizabeth Hand, the ceremony included a hybrid of live and virtual reflections on trailblazing author Shirley Jackson’s work and its continued relevance to both authors and readers today. To Tremblay, Jackson’s appeal and resonance can be explained quite simply.

“I feel like we’ve never met a writer who didn’t say, ‘Oh, Shirley Jackson, yeah, she’s meant a lot to me.’ It’s very clear to me that she’s a foundational author of the 20th century, and one whose stories I think still very much speak to our experiences now,” he said.

“She is a writer’s writer,” said F. Brett Cox, President of the Awards’ Board of Directors. “She is a great role model for us all in writing what you want to write, writing what you believe in, writing what you know to be true. Looking at what’s underneath the surface in seemingly normal circumstances… Nobody does that better than she did.”

Tremblay, who serves as a member of the Board of Advisors, delivered the opening address and examined some of Jackson’s best known works such as novels “The Haunting of Hill House” and “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” and her best known short story, “The Lottery.”

“I’ve been a fan of Shirley Jackson since I’ve been a reader,” he said. “When we started this award, we knew people loved Shirley Jackson, but I had no idea how pervasive her influence was.”

A literary powerhouse veiled beneath the façade of an American housewife, Jackson seems to parallel the sentiments of her character Merricat in “We Have Always Lived in the Castle.” “I can’t help it when people are frightened,” said Merricat. “I always want to frighten them more.”

For horror devotees, Shirley Jackson is synonymous with visceral, spellbinding prose and characters that haunt readers long after digesting the final page. It is no surprise that when her name is attached to a new work through a nomination, the literary community takes note.

“It’s been really overwhelming the reception the awards have gotten and how moved people are when they wind up being a finalist or winning an award named for Shirley Jackson,” said F. Brett Cox.

Like Jackson’s seminal body of work, the award crosses stylistic and geographical boundaries, nominating diverse authors from across the world. Awards Administrator JoAnn F. Cox described the importance of selecting works reminiscent of Jackson’s masterful storytelling, irrespective of genre.

“Sometimes the nominees are not even categorized, you wouldn’t know how to categorize them. But you read them, and think, ‘Oh yeah, it’s kind of strange, it’s kind of like a Shirley Jackson story,’” she said.

Before presenting the awards, Tremblay also enticed fans by confirming several exciting announcements, including the adaptation of his 2018 novel “The Cabin at the End of the World” into the newest M. Night Shyamalan film “Knock at the Cabin,” featuring actors Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff, and Rupert Grint. Additionally, set to release in 2023, Elizabeth Hand has been authorized by the Shirley Jackson Estate to publish a novel directly based on “The Haunting of Hill House.”

“What I personally love about Shirley Jackson is that she helps bring forward the uncanny, and the unsettling, and the strange” said JoAnn F. Cox.

After all, “we are all trapped within our own haunted lives,” Tremblay said.

The same can be said for the newest winners of the Shirley Jackson Awards, works that transfix readers while exposing what haunts each and every one of us.

The 2021 Winners of the Shirley Jackson Awards are:

A full list of the nominated works can be found here.