2022 Compton Crook Award – A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark

The Baltimore Science Fiction Society (BSFS) announced that A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark has won the 2022 Compton Crook Award for best first SF/Fantasy/horror novel. P. Djèlí Clark is the 40th winner of the award.

The Compton Crook Award is presented to the best of each year’s English language first novel by an author in the field of Science Fiction, Fantasy, or Horror by the members of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society at our annual science fiction convention, Balticon, the Maryland Regional Science Fiction Convention. Awards have been presented since 1983. The award is also known as the Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Award. Compton Crook, who wrote under the name of Stephen Tall, was a long-time Baltimore resident, Towson State University professor, and Science Fiction author. He died in 1981.

The winning author is invited to attend Balticon as a guest for two years, and presented with the cash award of $1,000 and an award plaque.

See the BSFS web site for more information about the Compton Crook Award.

Phenderson Djèlí Clark is the author of the novel A Master of Djinn, and the award-winning and Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon nominated author of the novellas Ring Shout, The Black God’s Drums and The Haunting of Tram Car 015. His short stories have appeared in online venues such as Tor.com, Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and in print anthologies including, Griots and Hidden Youth. You can find him on Twitter at @pdjeliclark and his blog The Disgruntled Haradrim.

Born in New York and raised mostly in Houston, Texas, he spent the early formative years of his life in the homeland of his parents, Trinidad and Tobago. When not writing speculative fiction, P. Djèlí Clark works as an academic historian whose research spans comparative slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic World. He melds this interest in history and the social world with speculative fiction, and has written articles on issues ranging from racism and H.P. Lovecraft to critiques of George Schuyler’s Black Empire, and has been a panelist and lecturer at conventions, workshops and other genre events.



2022 Compton Crook Award Nominees:

A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark Assassin’s Orbit by John Appel
Nucleation by Kimberly Unger
The Councillor by E. J. Beaton
The Witch’s Heart by Genevieve Gornichec
We Have Always Been Here by Lena Nguyen