World Fantasy Awards 2010s: A decade of winners

The 2010s represented a particularly vibrant era for the World Fantasy Awards, a period when the ceremony seemed to embrace both experimental storytelling and narratives that challenged genre conventions in exciting ways. The decade opened with China Miéville’s The City & the City, a novel that embodied the kind of boundary-pushing fantasy the award had come to champion—a work that felt simultaneously like hard-boiled noir and metaphysical puzzle box. As the years progressed, the award demonstrated a keen eye for voices and perspectives that expanded what fantasy could be: Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, with its Afrofuturist vision; G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen, which wove together digital culture and ancient magic; and Victor LaValle’s The Changeling, which grounded supernatural terror in deeply human domestic realism.

What made this decade particularly striking was the World Fantasy Awards’ commitment to recognizing short fiction as a laboratory for innovation. Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie” became a cultural touchstone, while the emergence of writers like Alyssa Wong and Kij Johnson—who claimed both novella and short fiction prizes across multiple years—signaled a meaningful shift toward younger, more diverse voices shaping the fantasy canon. The award also seemed increasingly comfortable with formally experimental works and stories that refused easy categorization, whether that meant time-shifting narratives or tales that examined the nature of memory and identity itself.

Browse through our complete list of the 2010s World Fantasy Awards winners below to discover which other remarkable works captured the committee’s attention across this dynamic decade.