The Association for Mormon Letters presented Orson Scott Card with the Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters two lifetime achievement awards at the AML Conference on April 22, held at Utah Valley University. Orson Scott and Kristine Card attended both the award ceremony and a panel discussion about his career after the award ceremony.
Citation
In celebrating Orson Scott Card’s lifetime of achievement in Mormon letters, the Association for Mormon Letters recognizes what is self-evident truth. In both the range and the success of his work, both as a Mormon writer and as a writer who happens to be Mormon, Scott has few if any peers.
For more than forty years, Scott has explored the possibilities for Mormon-inspired literature across genres, modes, and literary types: from plays to short stories, graphic novels, novels, pageants, and poems; in contemporary realistic fiction and historical fiction as well as the science fiction and fantasy for which he is best known; in stories explicitly by, for, and about Mormons and others where only readers who are “in the know” would ever detect the Mormon elements. Scott has produced work that is thematically Mormon, exploring ideas such as the responsibilities that accompany the potential for human divinity and the necessity for pain, suffering, and evil. He has explored characters and settings from the Mormon past and imagined Mormon futures, from his historical novel Saints—winner of a previous AML award—to his Folk of the Fringe stories, describing what Mormons look like both to others and to ourselves. He has retold distinctively Mormon stories in otherwordly settings, sharing the power of those narratives with non-Mormon readers—and offering the chance for Mormon readers to view them with new eyes. He’s written about the lives of ordinary (albeit ghost-haunted) Mormons in modern suburban wards. Perhaps more than any other single Mormon writer, he has stretched the boundaries of ways that literature may be Mormon.
As a writer, Scott possesses a full palette of skills, from worldbuilding to dramatic pacing to clean, crisp prose. Perhaps his greatest strength, however, is in his characters, so lifelike and memorable that they become part of his readers’ stock of lived experience. In Ender Wiggin, Scott creates a boy in which alienated youths see themselves. In shouted mock threats back and forth outside a frontier privy, he captures the ring of real family interactions. In the return of an old man to the Songhouse where he was trained as a boy, he shows both the passing of generations and the painful cost with which art is wrung out of lived experience. Ender, Bean, Ansset, Alvin, Taleswapper, Issib, Rigg, Rebekah, Qing-jao, Lanik Mueller, Dinah Kirkham, Gert Fram, and a host of others—major and minor characters both—are made real and memorable for us through the stories they inhabit.
Scott’s accomplishments as a writer well merit the AML’s recognition of him as an important voice in Mormon letters. But for Scott, being Mormon and a writer extends beyond storytelling. Scott was a major force in the beginning of a renaissance in Mormon theater in Utah in the 1970s, rewrote the Hill Cumorah pagent in 1988 and has continued to be involved in dramatic works on stage and screen. Perhaps most notable is the strong encouragement he has extended to generations of aspiring Mormon science fiction and fantasy authors, from Shayne Bell and Dave Wolverton to Brandon Sanderson, Eric James Stone, and Brad Torgersen, among others. As a teacher, critic, speaker, author of books on writing, host of an online community, patron saint of the annual sf&f symposium in Provo, and even (for a while) a publisher of Mormon-themed fiction, Scott has contributed generously of his time, talents, and resources in helping to build storytelling communities.
Tolkien once described his aim in writing The Lord of the Rings as being to “hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them.” Over the lifetime of his work as a storyteller in Zion, this is a goal Orson Scott Card has unquestionably achieved.
(This citation was written by Jonathan Langford.)
Biography
(Adapted fro Card’s own Hatrack River website). Best known for his science fiction novels Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow, Orson Scott Card has written in many other forms and genres. Beginning with dozens of plays and musical comedies produced in the 1960s and 70s (including many Mormon and scriptural themed plays), Card’s first published fiction appeared in 1977 — the short story “Gert Fram” in the July issue of The Ensign, and the novelet version of “Ender’s Game” in the August issue of Analog.
While Card’s early science fiction stories and novels were earning attention (Card won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer from the World Science Fiction Convention in 1978), he supported his family primarily by writing scripts for audiotapes produced by Living Scriptures of Ogden, Utah.
Later, in the mid-1980s, he wrote the screenplays for animated children’s videos from the New Testament and Book of Mormon, while the novel version of Ender’s Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead were winning the Hugo and Nebula awards.
Card’s writing ranges from traditional sci-fi (The Memory of Earth; Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus) to biblical novels (Stone Tables; Rachel & Leah), from contemporary fantasies (Magic Street; Enchantment; Lost Boys) to books on writing (Characters and Viewpoint; How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy). His “Tales of Alvin Maker” series (beginning with Seventh Son) reinvented medieval fantasy in an American frontier setting.
Card’s first collection of poetry, An Open Book, appeared in 2004, and that same year, in Los Angeles, he directed a production of Posing As People, three one-acts adapted by other writers from short stories by Card.
His most recent series, the young adult Pathfinder series and the fantasy Mithermages series are taking readers in new directions.
Card offers writing workshops from time to time, and recently committed himself to a longterm relationship with Southern Virginia University, where he teaches writing and literature. His “Hatrack River” website also offers free writing workshops, for both adults and younger writers.
Card has won the AML Novel Award three times, for A Women of Destiny (AKA Saints, 1984), Xenocide (1991), and Lost Boys (1992). Two other novels won Honorable Mentions. Ender’s World: Fresh Perspectives on the SF Classic Ender’s Game, edited by Card, won the AML Criticism Award in 2014. He has won four Hugo Awards, for Ender’s Game (1986), Speaker for the Dead (1987), “Eye for Eye” (1988), and How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (1991).
Card currently lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Kristine Allen Card, where his primary activities are writing a review column for the local Rhinoceros Times and feeding birds, squirrels, chipmunks, possums, and raccoons on the patio.
A catalog of Card’s work can be found here. A panel discussion of Card’s career, featuring Eric James Stone, Mattathias Westwood, Scott Parkin, Christopher Smith, and J. Scott Bronson, will be held on April 22 at 1:45-3:00pm.