ST Joshi has condemned the World Fantasy awards’ decision to stop using trophies modelled on the controversial writer as ‘the worst sort of political correctness’

HP Lovecraft’s biographer ST Joshi has returned his two World Fantasy awards following the organisers’ decision to stop using a bust of the author for the annual trophy – a move the Lovecraft expert called “a craven yielding to the worst sort of political correctness”.

The change was announced on Sunday. It follows a year-long campaign led by the author Daniel José Older, who launched a petition calling for the awards to end their trophy’s association with “avowed racist” Lovecraft.

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Writing on his blog, Joshi said he had returned the awards he won in previous years to the co-chairman of the World Fantasy Convention, David Hartwell. “Evidently,” Joshi added, “this move was meant to placate the shrill whining of a handful of social justice warriors who believe that a ‘vicious racist’ like Lovecraft has no business being honoured by such an award.”

Joshi also provided the text of his letter to Hartwell, telling him that the decision “seems to me a craven yielding to the worst sort of political correctness and an explicit acceptance of the crude, ignorant and tendentious slanders against Lovecraft propagated by a small but noisy band of agitators.”

Older’s petition followed a blogpost from WFA winner Nnedi Okorafor on her “conflicted” feelings about the prize after seeing Lovecraft’s racist 1912 poem On the Creation of Niggers. (Its couplets include: “A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure,/ Filled it with vice, and called the thing a Nigger.”)

“I knew of Lovecraft’s racial issues, antisemitism, etc, but I never knew it was this serious. How strong the sentiment must have been within his soul for him to sit down and write that poem,” wrote Okorafor. “This wasn’t racism metaphorically or abstractly rearing its ugly head within a piece of fiction, this was specific and focused. Who does that? Even in the early 1900s? That excuse of ‘that was just how most whites were back then’ has never flown with me. The fact that a lot of people back then were racists does not change the fact that Lovecraft was a racist.”

Following Sunday’s announcement, Older told the Guardian: “Today, fantasy is a better, more inclusive, and stronger genre because of it.”

But Joshi told Hartwell that the change means the awards are now “irremediably tainted”, and requested that he no longer be nominated for any future WFA. In the past, Joshi won an award for his Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volumes One and Two, and a special award for scholarship. His works include a biography of Lovecraft, further studies of the author, and extensive collections of the Cthulhu mythos creator’s writing and letters.

“I will never attend another World Fantasy Convention as long as I live. And I will do everything in my power to urge a boycott … among my many friends and colleagues,” wrote Joshi to Hartwell, adding on his blog that “if anyone feels that Lovecraft’s perennially ascending celebrity, reputation, and influence will suffer the slightest diminution as a result of this silly kerfuffle, they are very much mistaken”.