Organisers say new award will ‘represent both fantasy and horror, without bearing resemblance to any person’ after pressure over Lovecraft’s racism led them to drop previous design

Organisers of the World Fantasy awards are calling for artists to submit new designs for their trophy to replace the previous statuette featuring HP Lovecraft.

After an online petition condemned Lovecraft as “an avowed racist and a terrible wordsmith” last year, organisers at the World Fantasy Convention announced that the statuette would no longer be modelled on Lovecraft, the prolific creator of the Cthulhu mythos.

The awards’ administrators have now issued a statement saying that, while they “appreciate Gahan Wilson’s [Lovecraft] design, in use for more than four decades”, they have “decided that it is time to change the trophy”. From now until 2 April 2016, they will welcome submissions from artists for a new design, they said.

The first public condemnation of the trophy was in 2011, when Nnedi Okorafor won the World Fantasy award for best novel and blogged about her “conflicted” feelings over the fact that “a statuette of this racist man’s head is one of my greatest honours as a writer”.

Last year, the novelist Daniel José Older launched a petition calling for the organisers to “stop co-signing [Lovecraft’s] bigotry and move sci-fi/fantasy out of the past”, which gathered over 2,500 signatures.

Older had suggested the African-American science-fiction writer Octavia Butler could be the model for the bust, rather than Lovecraft, but the awards’ administrators have said that “the ideal design will represent both fantasy and horror, without bearing any physical resemblance to any person, living or dead”.

The Guardian’s Damien G Walter, meanwhile, has put forward the suggestion of a portal, writing that “all fantasy is about the act of moving through portals between worlds. It seems to me that when we ask what fantasy is, the portal is the most universal of answers.”