June 28, 2008 — The winners of the 34th annual Origins Awards were revealed tonight during the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio. The awards are intended to recognize outstanding work in the hobby game industry. They are organized each year by the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design, a specialized working group of the Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA).

This year, two books edited by James Lowder received awards:

Non-Fiction Publication of the Year

Hobby Games: The 100 Best

Fiction Publication of the Year

Astounding Hero Tales

Voting for the Origins Awards is conducted in stages over several months. Juries of area experts consider long lists of initial submissions and, after review and discussion, announce ten semifinalists in each award category. The semifinalists are then narrowed to five finalists by the retailers attending the GAMA Trade Show in the spring. Finally, the winners are selected by the attendees at the Origins Game Fair.

Credit for both awards also belongs to the authors who contributed to the projects and the publishers who supported and nurtured them. The two books are creator-owned, making the progressive attitudes of Hero and Green Ronin vital to their successes. (Creator-owned projects are still somewhat unusual in the hobby publishing market. In fact, this is the first time that only creator-owned projects have captured the awards in the fiction category and the non-fiction/periodical category in the same year.)

These are Lowder's third and fourth Origins Awards. He had previously won awards in the fiction category for the anthologies The Book of Final Flesh (2003) and Path of the Bold (2004), and had been a finalist in both 2002 for the anthology The Book of More Flesh and 2003 for the novella "The Night Chicago Died," which features the debut of his character The Corpse.

Details on this year's awards, including a full list of finalists in each category, can be found at the Academy website here.