The BSFA Awards are given every year by the British Science Fiction Association. The Best Non-Fiction award is open to any written work about science fiction or fantasy which appeared in its current form in the previous year. Whole collections of work that has been published elsewhere previously are ineligible as is work published by the BSFA. The award was renamed to Best Long Non-Fiction in 2023.
| BSFA Award for Best Non-Fiction | |
|---|---|
| Awarded for | The best science fiction or fantasy non-fiction published in the previous calendar year |
| Country | UK |
| Presented by | British Science Fiction Association |
| First awarded | 2002 |
| Currently held by | Nina Allan, A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller |
| Website | BSFA Awards |
Winners and Shortlists
The ceremonies are named after the year that the eligible works were published, despite the awards being given out in the next year.
* Winners and joint winners
| Year | Author(s) | Work | Publisher/Publication | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2001 | Stephen Baxter* | Omegatropic | BSFA | [1] |
| Gene Wolfe | The Best Introduction to the Mountains | Interzone (#174, Dec '01) | ||
| Andrew M. Butler | Terry Pratchett | The Pocket Essentials | ||
| Justina Robson | Storming the Bastille | The Alien Online (Jul '01) | ||
| Michelle Le Blanc & Colin Odell | Tim Burton | The Pocket Essentials | ||
| 2002 | David Langford* | Introduction to Maps: The Uncollected John Sladek | Big Engine | [2] |
| Nick Gevers & Chistopher Priest | The Interrogation | Interzone (#183, Oct '02) | ||
| Oliver Morton | Mapping Mars | Fourth Estate | ||
| Frederick E. Smith | Once There Was a Magazine | Beacon | ||
| Lucius Shepard | Film review of The Time Machine | Electric Story 2 (Apr '02) | ||
| 2003 | Farah Mendlesohn* | Reading Science Fiction | The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction | [3] |
| M. J. Simpson | Hitchhiker: A Biography of Douglas Adams | Hodder & Stoughton | ||
| John H. Arnold & Andy Wood | Nothing is Written: Politics, Ideology and the Burden of History in the Fall Revolution Quartet | The True Knowledge of Ken MacLeod | ||
| Mike Ashley | The Profession of Science Fiction #58: Mapping the Territory | Foundation (#87) | ||
| Cheryl Morgan | A Sick Mind book review of The Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases | Emerald City (#97) | ||
| 2004 | No award | |||
| 2005 | Gary K. Wolfe* | Soundings: Reviews 1992-1996 | Beccon | [4] |
| 2006 | Paul Kincaid & Andrew M. Butler | The Arthur C. Clarke Award: A Critical Anthology | Serendip Foundation | [5] |
| Justine Larbalestier | Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century | Wesleyan | ||
| Paul Gravett | Great British Comics | Aurum | ||
| Julie Phillips | James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon | St. Martin's | ||
| Farah Mendlesohn | Polder: A Festschrift for John Clute and Judith Clute | Old Earth | ||
| 2007 | No award | |||
| 2008 | Farah Mendlesohn* | Rhetorics of Fantasy | Wesleyan | [6] |
| John Clute | Physics for Amnesia talk at the Science Fiction as a Literary Genre symposium | Gresham College | ||
| Roz Kaveney | Superheroes!: Capes and Crusaders in Comics and Films | I.B. Tauris | ||
| Paul Kincaid | What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction | Beccon | ||
| 2009 | Nick Lowe* | Mutant Popcorn film review column | Interzone | [7] |
| John Clute | Canary Fever: Reviews | Beccon | ||
| Deepa D. | I Didn't Dream of Dragons | Deepa D. Blog | ||
| Farah Mendlesohn & Edward James | A Short History of Fantasy | Middlesex | ||
| 2010 | Paul Kincaid* | Blogging the Hugos: Decline | Big Other | [8] |
| Jonathan Strahan & Gary K. Wolfe | Notes from Coode Street Podcast | Notes from Coode Street | ||
| Francis Spufford | Red Plenty | Faber & Faber | ||
| Adam Roberts | Book reviews of The Wheel of Time | Punkadiddle | ||
| Abigail Nussbaum | With Both Feet in the Clouds | Asking the Wrong Questions | ||
| 2011 | John Clute*, Peter Nicholls* & David Langford* | The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Third Edition | SF Gateway | [9] |
| Mike Ashley | Out of This World: Science Fiction But Not as You Know It | British Library | ||
| Jared Shurin & Anne C. Perry | Pornokitsch | Pornokitsch | ||
| Abigail Nussbaum | Review of Arslan | Asking the Wrong Questions | ||
| Ian Sales | SF Mistressworks | SF Mistressworks | ||
| Graham Sleight, Tony Keen & Simon Bradshaw | The Unsilent Library: Essays on the Russell T. Davies Era of the New Doctor Who | Science Fiction Foundation | ||
| 2012 | Lavie Tidhar* | The World SF Blog | The World SF Blog | [10] |
| Farah Mendlesohn & Edward James | The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature | Cambridge | ||
| Karen Burnham | The Complexity of the Humble Space Suit in the book Rocket Science | Mutation | ||
| Maureen Kincaid Speller | The Shortlist Project | Paper Knife | ||
| Paul Kincaid | The Widening Gyre | Los Angeles Review of Books | ||
| 2013 | Jeff VanderMeer* | Wonderbook | Abrams Image | [11] |
| John J. Johnston | Going Forth by Night in Unearthed | Jurassic | ||
| Liz Bourke | Sleeps with Monsters | Tor | ||
| 2014 | Edward James* | Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers in the Great War | fantastic-writers-and-the-great-war.com | [12] |
| Paul Kincaid | Call and Response | Beccon | ||
| Johnathan McCalmont | Deep Forests and Manicured Gardens: A Look at Two New Short Fiction Magazines | Ruthless Culture | ||
| Karen Burnham | Greg Egan | Illinois | ||
| Niall Harrison | The State of British SF and Fantasy: A Symposium | Strange Horizons | ||
| 2015 | Adam Roberts* | Rave and Let Die: The SF and Fantasy of 2014 | Steel Quill | [13] |
| Jeff VanderMeer | From Annihilation to Acceptance: A Writer's Surreal Journey | The Atlantic (Jan ‘15) | ||
| Alisa Krasnostein & Alexandra Pierce | Letters to Tiptree | Twelfth Planet | ||
| Nina Allan | Time Pieces: Doctor Change or Doctor Die | Interzone (Nov/Dec ‘15) | ||
| Jonathan McCalmont | What Price, Your Critical Agency | Ruthless Culture | ||
| 2016 | Geoff Ryman* | 100 African Writers of SFF | tor.com | [14] |
| Erin Horakova | Boucher, Backbone and Blake: The Legacy of Blakes Seven | Strange Horizons | ||
| Anna McFarlane | Breaking the Cycle of the Golden Age: Jack Glass and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy | Adam Roberts: Critical Essays | ||
| Ann VanderMeer & Jeff VanderMeer | Introduction | The Big Book of Science Fiction | ||
| Paul Graham Raven | New Model Authors? Authority, Authordom, Anarchism and the Atomized Text in a Networked World | Adam Roberts: Critical Essays | ||
| Rob Hansen | THEN: Science Fiction Fandom in the UK 1930-1980 | Ansible | ||
| 2017 | Paul Kincaid* | Iain M. Banks | Illinois | [15] |
| Nina Allan, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Victoria Hoyle, Vajra Chandrasekera, Nick Hubble, Paul Kincaid, Jonathan McCalmont, Megan AM | The 2017 Shadow Clarke Award blog | Anglia Ruskin Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy | ||
| Juliet E. McKenna | The Myth of Meritocracy and the Reality of the Leaky Pipe and Other Obstacles in Science Fiction & Fantasy | Gender Identity and Sexuality in Current Fantasy and Science Fiction | ||
| Vandana Singh | The Unthinkability of Climate Change: Thoughts on Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement | Strange Horizons | ||
| Adam Roberts | Blog posts for Wells at the World's End | Wells at the World's End | ||
| 2018 | Aliette de Bodard* | On Motherhood and Erasure: People-Shaped Holes, Hollow Characters and the Illusion of Impossible Adventure | Intellectus Speculativus | [16] |
| Ruth EJ Booth | Noise and Sparks 2018 articles | Shoreline of Infinity | ||
| Adam Roberts | Publishing the Science Fiction Canon: The Case of Scientific Romance | Cambridge | ||
| Liz Bourke | Sleeps With Monsters 2018 articles | tor.com | ||
| Nina Allan | Time Pieces 2018 articles | Interzone | ||
| 2019 | Farah Mendlesohn* | The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein | Unbound | [17] |
| Glyn Morgan & C. Palmer-Patel | Sideways in Time: Critical Essays on Alternate History Fiction | Liverpool University Press | ||
| Gareth L. Powell | About Writing | Luna Press | ||
| Adam Roberts | H.G. Wells: A Literary Life | Palgrave Macmillan | ||
| Jo L. Walton | Away Day: Star Trek and the Utopia of Merit | Big Echo | ||
| 2020 | Adam Roberts* | It's the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid Of | Elliot & Thompson | [18] |
| Francesca T. Barbini | Ties That Bind: Love in Science Fiction and Fantasy | Luna Press | ||
| Paul Kincaid | The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest | Liverpool University Press | ||
| Andrew Milner & J. R. Burgmann | Science Fiction and Climate Change | Liverpool University Press | ||
| Jo L. Walton | Estranged Entrepreneurs | Foundation 137 | ||
| Jo Walton | Books in Which No Bad Things Happen | Tor | ||
| 2021 | Francesca T. Barbini* | Worlds Apart: Worldbuilding in Fantasy and Science Fiction | Luna Publishing | [19] |
| Anna McFarlane | Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology: Seeing Through the Mirrorshades | Routledge | ||
| Joy Sanchez-Taylor | Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Color | Ohio State Press | ||
| Mark Bould | The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture | Verso Books | ||
| John Coxon, Alison Scott & Liz Batty | Octothorpe Podcast | Octothorpe | ||
| Val Nolan | Science Fiction and the Pathways out of the COVID Crisis | The Polyphony | ||
| 2022 | Rob Wilkins* | Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes | Doubleday | [20] |
| Fiona Moore | Management Lessons from Game of Thrones: Organization Theory and Strategy in Westeros | Edward Elgar Publishing | ||
| Wole Talabi and the ASFS | Preliminary Observations from an Incomplete History of African SFF | SFWA | ||
| Maureen Kincaid Speller | The Critic and the Clue: Tracking Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker | Strange Horizons | ||
| Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki | Too Dystopian For Whom? A Continental Nigerian Writer’s Perspective | Uncanny Magazine | ||
| 2023 | Nina Allan* | A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller | Luna Press | [21] |
| Niall Harrison | All These Worlds | Briardene | ||
| Chinelo Onwualu | Ex Marginalia: Essays on Writing Speculative Fiction by Persons of Color | Hydra House | ||
| Tiffani Angus and Val Nolan | Spec Fic for Newbies: A Beginner's Guide to Writing Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror | Luna Press | ||
| Farah Mendlesohn | The Female Man: Eastercon talk | n/a | ||
External links
References
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