The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award

The Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award began in 2001, when the newly-formed Cordwainer Smith Foundation initiated the award. the purpose of the award is to recognize and draw attention to other fantasy or science fiction authors

We were very fortunate to have the panel of Robert Silverberg, Scott Edelman, Gardner Dozois, and John Clute as our first judges, and currently Martin H. Greenberg, Barry N. Malzberg, Robert J. Sawyer, and Mike Resnick are ably filling that role. Gordon Van Gelder also served for a short time.

What vast knowledge of science fiction history resides in those minds! And when I think of how much they all no doubt have to do, I am very grateful for their participation.

We started off with quite an event at Worldcon in Philadelphia in 2001, when the award went to Olaf Stapledon; at the beginning of that page, you can read Robert Silverberg's remarks about the reasons for the award. There is also mention of it by several of the participants of the Cordwainer Smith panel discussion held at Worldcon. For further background, see the press releases section of this site.

The award now has a permanent venue at Readercon. Here's a blog entry from one of our original judges, Scott Edelman, about a day at Readercon in 2008, including comments about the Rediscovery Award going to Stanley G Weinbaum It gives you a bit of the flavor of the event, in case you might like to go sometime.

The winners of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award so far have been:

• Olaf Stapledon, 2001
• R.A. Lafferty, 2002
• Edgar Pangborn, 2003
• Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, 2004
• Leigh Brackett, 2005
• William Hope Hodgson, 2006
• Daniel F. Galouye, 2007
• Stanley G. Weinbaum, 2008
• A. Merritt, 2009
• Mark Clifton, 2010
• Katherine MacLean, 2011
• Fredric Brown, 2012

The links take you to the pages about them on this site, where I have tried to give you an idea of their lives and work.. some years more than other.