In keeping with the new plans to announce things early, to give honorees time to enjoy the honor and to publicize them early and well (see this article), Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) President Russell Davis has announced that M.J. Engh will be honored at next April’s Nebula Awards Weekend as the Author Emerita.
“Well, I hope ’emerita’ doesn’t mean ‘over the hill,’ but I’m truly honored—blown away, in fact,” Engh said. “It’s nice to know that somebody has noticed me.”
Under the pseudonym, Jane Beauclerk, Mary Jane Engh published her first sf story in the July 1964 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction: “We Serve the Star of Freedom.” Her first novel, Arslan, was published in 1976. It was the story of a future United States conquered by a third-world power. Her later novels include Wheel of the Winds (1988) and Rainbow Man (1993). Her bibliography is on this page.
“The reason I haven’t been turning out SF in recent decades is that I’m up to my neck in historical projects,” Engh said. “I’ve been working on The Womb of God, a projected trilogy of historical novels on the life and times of the 5th-century Roman empress Galla Placidia, and—the biggest time-absorber—collaborating with my historian friend Kathy Meyer on a massive reference work to be called Femina Habilis: A Biographical Dictionary of Active Women in the Ancient Roman World from Earliest Times to 527 C.E. Plus, I do have a few chapters of a science fiction novel I hope to finish someday.”
Engh has also published non-fiction, children’s fiction, and poetry. She won a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship Grant in 1982, the Mellon “Starving Artist Award” in 1997, and the Women’s Classical Caucus Oral Paper Award in 1999 (shared with Kathryn E. Meyer).
SFWA’s Nebula Award Weekend will be 24-26 April 2009, at the Luxe Hotel Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles, California. The actual awards presentation banquet will be held on the UCLA campus, in conjunction with the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
The organization began naming Authors Emeritus in 1995 “as a way to recognize and appreciate senior writers in the genres of science fiction and fantasy who have made significant contributions to our field but who are no longer active or whose excellent work may no longer be as widely known as it once was.” Previous Authors Emeritus include: Emil Petaja, Wilson Tucker, Judith Merril, Nelson S. Bond, William Tenn, Daniel Keyes, Robert Sheckley, Katherine MacLean, Charles L. Harness, William F. Nolan, D.G. Compton, and Ardath Mayhar.