Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels, described as 'sordid wretchedness' in the Daily Mail, takes joint prize with Jeffrey Ford's The Shadow YearA dark and shocking reworking of the Snow White and Rose Red fairytale by Australian author Margo Lanagan has won the World Fantasy award for best novel.Lanagan's young adult title Tender Morsels was this weekend named joint winner of the best novel prize with Jeffrey Ford's The Shadow Year, a sinister tale of small-town boyhood in the 1960s.
Tender Morsels has drawn praise and condemnation alike for its challenging opening, which sees the 15-year-old Liga go through gang-rape, miscarriage and sexual abuse at the hands of her father, before escaping to a dream world where she brings up her two children.Lanagan said she was "delighted" that Tender Morsels, described as "sordid wretchedness" in the Daily Mail but as "funny, tragic, wise, tender and beautifully written" in the Guardian, had won the award at the World Fantasy Convention in San Jose, California on Sunday.
"This is a strong endorsement from the fantasy reading, writing, publishing and reviewing community, which is just as important to me as the children's and young adult literature community," she said.
"To have both audiences respond so positively to what is undeniably a strange, dark novel is a joy to me and an affirmation that when I write from the deepest part of me, there are people out there who get it."She hit out at the articles claiming young adults are unable to handle the themes of her book.
"There's this assumption that all children have the luxury of a childhood where their innocence is always respected and their main occupation is pleasant play - at the age of 18, or 21, they are then thrust into the real world and shown its uglier side, but not before," she said.
"How on earth do people imagine we equip children for life, if we never show them the sorts of issues other people encounter, if we never talk through with them how they might deal with difficulty, or violence, or unexpected shocks and surprises?"Lanagan also pointed to the current "fashion for vampires and all things gothic", which she said showed the appetite for "dark themes, sinister characters, and horrific events against which the kinder and sweeter aspects of human nature, when they do show, can shine even more brightly".She was inspired to write Tender Morsels, she said, "when something down in my guts responded to the way the Grimm brothers had changed Caroline Stahl's story when they rewrote it".
"I was annoyed with the moral message they forced the story to carry," she said.
"Although my novel doesn't necessarily offer any more hope for the women characters than theirs does, at least it's less adamant than Snow White and Rose Red that the women's oppression is a good and necessary thing."A book, she believes, is "perhaps the safest, the least confronting form" in which to explore tough stories, as it is much easier to decide to put down or take up an uncomfortable tale in a book, than it is to reject one on television or in a cinema.
"If a young person (or an adult) is not ready, or not 'in the mood', for a particular story, or they need to pause in the reading, or even stop altogether, with a book they can pause, or stop, and no one else need see, know or comment," she said.The World Fantasy awards also saw the Australian graphic novelist Shaun Tan win the best artist prize, while Ford picked up a second award, for best collection, for The Drowned Life.
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