Margo Lanagan is an Australian YA author who has won many awards. I will put a link to her Wikipedia entry at the end of this post, so you can find out how many awards she has won over the years.
I will talk here about some of those I have read.
The first of her books I read, Touching Earth Lightly, was not speculative fiction. To be honest, I didn’t care for it. And she wrote quite a few mainstream novels under pen names.
But then I began to read her fantasy books, both short stories and novels and loved them.
Tender Morsels was based on the fairy tale “Snow White And Rose Red.” That story is about two sisters living in the forest and being helped by an enchanted bear, as well as trying to help a very ungrateful dwarf. In this novel the bear is a young man who comes from another universe in bear form.
It was controversial in the US, due to violence and rape elements(their mother had been raped by her father). There were also complaints that it was not YA fiction). That didn’t stop it from winning several awards - the World Fantasy Award, the Ditmar Award(Australian SF and fantasy award) and making some shortlists and honour books - the Shirley Jackson for horror fiction, the Printz Award honour book for YA fiction, the Aurealis shortlist(Australia), and the Locus Award.
Personally, I loved it.
Another novel I really enjoyed, which started as a novella, was Sea Hearts, known overseas as The Brides Of Rollrock Island. It is set on an island in nineteenth century Scotland. A young woman - very unpopular locally - finds that she can turn seals into human form, as selkies. She has some selkie ancestry herself, as there were human/selkie marriages in the past. If you are familiar with these stories you will know that the man who wants a selkie wife has to hide her sealskin or she will return to the ocean. And they always find their skins and go back, in the folk tales.
But in this novel, the selkie brides are effectively Stepford wives. They are not robots, but they are beautiful and they do as they are told. It gets to the point where all the island’s men want one, even the married ones. That is very profitable for the woman who produces them. The only problem is that the children born of them are all boys, as the girls can’t survive on land and have to be put back into the ocean, where they become seals. When the island’s human women decide they have had enough and leave, there are only men and boys left.
I won’t spoil the ending, just read it! It also was an award winner, starting with the CBCA Award, for Older Readers. It won several awards within Australia and was at least shortlisted for others.
A beautiful book!
Most of her speculative fiction was short stories and published as collections, such as Black Juice(2004), featuring the rather sad story “Singing My Sister Down”, which won the World Fantasy Award. The collection itself also won several awards, and it was only the first of several more collections.
Here is a link to Margo Lanagan’s Wikipedia entry, where you can find a list of her books and the awards they have won.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margo_Lanagan
The books are still available in ebook, print and audiobook.
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