Awards and Nominations
Deryni Checkmate was a finalist for the 1973 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for outstanding work in the field of fantasy literature. The other finalists were Ursula K. Le Guin's The Farthest Shore, Poul Anderson's The Dancer from Atlantis, Thomas Burnett Swann's Green Phoenix, and Roger Zelazny's The Guns of Avalon. Kurtz and Zelazny had both been nominated for the same award in 1971, each for the first books of their signature series (Kurtz' Deryni Rising and Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber), but they both lost to The Crystal Cave, the first novel in Mary Stewart's signature series. In 1973, Kurtz and Zelazny lost again, this time to Evangeline Walton's The Song of Rhiannon.
In 1973, Deryni Checkmate ranked 15th in an annual poll of Locus magazine readers, placing it between Jack Vance's The Brave, Free Men and Barry N. Malzberg's Beyond Apollo. (The poll was won by Isaac Asimov for his novel, The Gods Themselves.)
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