M.R. Carey's Once Was Willem Wins Best Novel at the 2026 World Fantasy Awards

M.R. Carey's Once Was Willem has won best novel at the 2026 World Fantasy Awards. The winners were announced on October 25 at a ceremony in Oakland, California, during this year's World Fantasy Convention, according to the full results published by Locus and the winners list File 770 ran from the convention's press release.

Once Was Willem is published by Orbit in the US and the UK. It beat a shortlist of four other novels: Martin Cahill's Audition for the Fox (Tachyon), Giovanni De Feo's The Secret Market of the Dead (Saga), Alix E. Harrow's The Everlasting (Tor) and Pat Murphy's The Adventures of Mary Darling (Tachyon).

The other winners

• Long fiction: Psychopomp & Circumstance by Eden Royce (Tordotcom)
• Short fiction: "The Hungry Mouth at the Edge of Space and the Goddess Knitting at Home" by Renan Bernardo (Reactor, August 27, 2025)
• Anthology: Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology, edited by Julie C. Day, Carina Bissett and Craig Laurance Gidney (Essential Dreams)
• Collection: Uncertain Sons and Other Stories by Thomas Ha (Undertow Publications)
• Artist: Kathleen Jennings
• Special award, professional: Jaymee Goh, Jill Roberts and Jacob Weisman, for Tachyon Publications
• Special award, non-professional: Wendy Wagner, for Nightmare magazine

Clive Barker and Joyce Carol Oates were named this year's life achievement recipients. This year's judges were Chịkọdịlị Emelụmadụ, Tamsyn Muir, Madeleine E. Robins, Richard Thomas and Ann VanderMeer.

A good night for small presses

Look past the novel category and the list leans hard toward independent publishers. Thomas Ha's collection came out from Undertow, a small Canadian press, and Ha was on the ballot three times this year: for the collection, for its title story in long fiction, and for "In My Country" in short fiction. The anthology winner came from Essential Dreams. Tachyon, the San Francisco independent, had two novels on the shortlist and then took the professional special award for the people who run it.

The big houses still had a presence. Tor, Saga, Orbit and Tordotcom all placed books, and Orbit took the top prize. But for a writer trying to work out whether a small press can get a book in front of awards juries, this year's results are a fairly clear yes.

Why it matters for writers

The World Fantasy Awards are juried, not voted on by fans, which makes them different from the Hugos. A panel of five reads the field and picks the ballot. That means a book doesn't need a large online following to get noticed, but it does need to reach the judges. Short fiction published online, like Bernardo's story in Reactor, can and does win. For authors writing shorter work, magazines and anthologies remain a real path to recognition, and collections from small presses are clearly in the conversation too.

Sources

• Locus, October 25, 2026: World Fantasy Awards Winners (full ballot with winners marked)
• File 770, October 25, 2026: World Fantasy Awards 2026 (based on the convention's press release)