"The World Fantasy Awards, presented at the World Fantasy Convention every fall, have been around for almost 40 years. The trophy for such categories as Novel, Short Fiction and Anthology is a caricatured bust of H.P. Lovecraft, author of such classics of weird fiction as "At the Mountains of Madness" and "The Call of Cthulhu." Lovecraft is a beloved figure in pop culture, and an influence on everyone from the Argentinian metafictionist Jorge Luis Borges to the film director Guillermo del Toro, as well as untold numbers of rock bands and game designers.
But not everyone who wins a "Howard" likes the idea of keeping Lovecraft's face around the house. Nnedi Okorafor, who won the WFA for best novel in 2011 ("Who Fears Death"), wrote a blog post about her discomfort with the trophy after a friend showed her a racist poem that Lovecraft wrote in 1912. Enough dissatisfaction has accumulated to inspire another writer, Daniel Jose Older, to petition the WFA's administrators to change the award to a bust of the late Octavia Butler, an African-American author more commonly identified with science fiction."
http://www.salon.com/2014/09/11/its_ok_to_admit_that_h_p_lovecraft_was_racist/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow- Ikhide
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