The Crawford Award is presented annually by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA) for a debut book of fantasy. The winner for 2022 is Usman T. Malik for his short story collection Midnight Doorways: Fables from Pakistan.

This is only the second time in its 40-year history that the award has been conferred on a writer not from an Anglophone country, and the first time that a Muslim writer has won it.

Malik is the recipient of a number of laurels in science fiction and fantasy, including the 2016 British Fantasy Award for his novella The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn and the 2014 Bram Stoker Award for his short story ‘The Vaporisation Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family’. He has also been nominated for the World Fantasy, Nebula, Locus and Eugis Foster awards.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 20th, 2022