Winners 2017
The year’s most progressive, intelligent and entertaining speculative fiction, sponsored by Blackwell’s who have set up a dedicated page full of tentacles just for us.
In a ceremony at the Star of Kings pub in London the winners of the 2017 Kitschies tentacles were announced. The judges commented on the state of genre, the pleasureable tactility of the books, the wonderful and difficult job of judging, and the pleasure of working with the genre community.
2017’s shortlisted books were narrowed down from 142 submissions, coming from over 48 publishers. The shortlists come from the largest literary and genre names in publishing to the smallest of independents.
The Red Tentacle (Novel) winner:
The Rift
Nina Allan
(Titan)
The rest of the shortlist
Black Wave
Michelle Tea
(& Other Stories)
We See Everything
William Sutcliffe
(Bloomsbury)
Fever
Deon Meyer, translated by L. Seegers
(Hodder)
City of Circles 
Jess Richards
(Hodder)
The Golden Tentacle (Debut) winner:
Hunger Makes the Wolf
Alex “Acks” Wells
(Angry Robot)
The rest of the shortlist
How Saints Die
Carmen Marcus
(Harville Secker)
Age of Assassins
RJ Barker
(Orbit)
The Black Tides of Heaven
JY Yang
(Tor.com)
Mandlebrot the Magnificent
Liz Ziemska
(Tor.com)
The Red and Gold tentacle judges were Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Leila Abu El Hawa, Joshua Idehen, Ewa Scibor-Rylska, and Alasdair Stuart
The Inky Tentacle (Cover Art) winner:
The History of Bees
Maja Lunde
Design by Jack Smyth and the S&S Art Department
(Scribner)
The rest of the shortlist included
The Land of Neverendings
Kate Saunders
Illustrated by David Dean
(Faber and Faber)
Black Wave
Michelle Tea
llustrated by Rose Stafford at Print Club, design by Hannah Naughton
(& Other Stories)
The Real-Town Murders
Adam Roberts
Jacket design and illustration by Black Sheep
(Gollancz)
Our Memory Like Dust
Gavin Chait
Design by Richard Shailer
(Transworld)
The Inky Tentacle judges are Dapo Adeola, Sharan Dhaliwal, Jet Purdie, and Stuart Taylor
Blackwell
The winners can be easily found and purchased at any Blackwell’s shop or online. Details can be found on the Blackwell’s dedicated Kitschies website.
About Blackwell’s
Blackwell’s began 139 years ago in Oxford and has a worldwide reputation for unrivalled customer service, specialist knowledge and passion for bookselling. We continue to be a values led business where putting our customers first, taking personal ownership, being professional and having integrity are part of who we are.
We have 32 shops including Flagship shops in Oxford, Cambridge, London and Edinburgh. There are 23 academic and campus shops with strong partnerships with their host universities. We have pop-up bookshops (called Connects) in many other HE UK institutions.
Blackwells.co.uk is growing rapidly in UK and international markets. The platform is designed and managed in-house from a London development office
About The Kitschies
The Kitschies are a not-for-profit association dedicated to promote the discussion of genre literature in all its many forms. To that end it hosts a range of events and runs an eponymous award each year to a range of books, celebrating progressive, intelligent, and entertaining literature with an element of the speculative or fantastic. Previous winners include Margaret Atwood, Karen Lord, Patrick Ness, Becky Chambers, Lauren Beukes, Ruth Ozeki and China Miéville.