World Fantasy Awards 2024
The Reformatory, witches et al.
The World Fantasy Awards—for the best fantasy fiction published in English in the previous year—were awarded on the final day of the 17-20 Oct World Fantasy Convention in Niagara Falls, New York State
These have been around since 1975. They’re awarded on the final day of the annual World Fantasy Conventions, which have taken place, so far, in various locations in the US, Canada and the UK. Nominations are by a combination of a ballot for attendees of recent conventions and selection by a panel of judges (generally fantasy authors and related professionals). The judges then vote on the winners. There are nine categories, including best novel, novella, short story and artist, and lifetime achievement; and sometimes a tenth, the Convention Award, for “peerless contributions to the fantasy genre”. Unusually, none of these have changed since 1988—most multi-category awards are always chopping and changing the categories. Stephen King has been nominated nine times for best novel without winning (although has won in other categories), and Gene Wolfe is the most nominated of five authors to have won twice, with eight nominations.
Selected Results
Best Novel: The Reformatory by Tananarive Due, a 58-year-old American author and lecturer. The book also won this year’s Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel (basically, best horror novel). It’s “a gloriously creepy Deep South horror story based on the infamous Dozier School for boys” and has a spookily atmospheric front cover. The Dozier School was a reform school in Marianna, Florida, USA from 1900 to 2011, with “a reputation for abuse, beatings, rapes, torture, and even murder of students by staff” (from Wikipedia). A forensic anthropology survey commissioned in 2012 identified 55 burials on the grounds, mostly outside its cemetery, and documented nearly 100 deaths at the school. In the novel, a twelve-year-old boy is sent to is sent to a reformatory and, in order to survive the horrors of the school, he must enlist the help of the school's ghosts, who have their own motivations.
Best Novella: Half the House Is Haunted by Josh Malerman, an American novelist, short story writer, film producer, and one of two singer/songwriters in the rock band The High Strung. This is one of five novellas in the book Spin a Black Yarn.
Best Anthology: The Book of Witches, edited by Jonathan Strahan, a British-born Australian editor and publisher of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and illustrated by Alyssa Winans. It contains 29 short stories and poems from various authors about … wait for it … witches.
Best Collection: No One Will Come Back For Us, a collection of seventeen short stories by Premee Mohamed, an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Canada. The difference between the anthology and collection prizes is that the latter contains works all by the same author.
The historic winners and nominees for all categories are shown under the History section of the World Fantasy website, while the best novel winners and nominees are in a neat list at Wikipedia World Fantasy Award—Novel. You can also find lists of winners and nominees for all categories under the umbrella Wikipedia, World Fantasy Award page (scroll down a bit for the Categories section).
Next up are the Booker Prize and Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, both to be announced on 12 Nov. You can see the shortlists for each at the links given.
