Tananarive Due's The Reformatory wins the World Fantasy Award for best novel
The 2024 World Fantasy Awards, presented in Niagara Falls, gave best novel to Tananarive Due's The Reformatory.
The World Fantasy Awards for work published in 2023 were presented at the 2024 World Fantasy Convention, held in Niagara Falls, New York, from 17 to 20 October. The best novel award went to The Reformatory by Tananarive Due, published by Saga Press in the United States and Titan in the UK.
In the shorter categories, Josh Malerman won best novella for Half the House Is Haunted, and Nghi Vo took best short fiction for "Silk and Cotton and Linen and Blood". The anthology award went to The Book of Witches, edited by Jonathan Strahan, and the collection award to Premee Mohamed's No One Will Come Back for Us and Other Stories, published by Undertow Publications. Audrey Benjaminsen was named best artist.
Life achievement awards were given to Ginjer Buchanan and Jo Fletcher, both long-serving editors. The special awards went to Liza Groen Trombi for Locus magazine and to Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas for Uncanny Magazine.
The list is a reminder of how much of fantasy's infrastructure rests on editors, small presses and magazines rather than on novels alone. Undertow, a small independent press, sits among the winners beside the large imprints, and two of the four special and life achievement honours went to people who spent their careers acquiring and shaping other writers' books. For anyone writing short fiction, the magazine and anthology categories remain a real route to notice.
Sources: World Fantasy Convention: 2024 nominations and winners; SFFWorld: World Fantasy 2024 winners announced.