Diana Wynne Jones was a British novelist, poet, academic, literary critic, and short story writer. She principally wrote fantasy and speculative fiction novels for children and young adults. Although usually described as fantasy, some of her work also incorporates science fiction themes and elements of realism. Jones's work often explores themes of time travel and parallel or multiple universes. Some of her better-known works are the Chrestomanci series, the Dalemark series, the three Moving Castle novels, Dark Lord of Derkholm, and The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.
Dragonflight is a science fiction novel by the American-Irish author Anne McCaffrey. It is the first book in the Dragonriders of Pern series. First published by Ballantine Books in July 1968, it was a fix-up of two novellas which between them had made McCaffrey the first woman writer to win a Hugo and a Nebula Award.
Brandon Winn Sanderson is an American author of high fantasy and science fiction. He is best known for the Cosmere fictional universe, in which most of his fantasy novels, most notably the Mistborn series and The Stormlight Archive, are set. Outside of the Cosmere, he has written several young adult and juvenile series including The Reckoners, the Skyward series, and the Alcatraz series. He is also known for finishing Robert Jordan's high fantasy series The Wheel of Time. Sanderson has created several graphic novel fantasy series, including White Sand and Dark One.
David Geddes Hartwell was an American critic, publisher, and editor of thousands of science fiction and fantasy novels. He was best known for work with Signet, Pocket, and Tor Books publishers. He was also noted as an award-winning editor of anthologies. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes him as "perhaps the single most influential book editor of the past forty years in the American [science fiction] publishing world".
Naomi Novik is an American author of speculative fiction. She is known for the Temeraire series (2006–2016), an alternate history of the Napoleonic Wars involving dragons, and her Scholomance fantasy series (2020–2022). Her standalone fantasy novels Uprooted (2015) and Spinning Silver (2018) were inspired by Polish folklore and the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale respectively. Novik has won many awards for her work, including the Alex, Audie, British Fantasy, Locus, Mythopoeic and Nebula Awards.
Patrick James Rothfuss is an American author. He is best known for his highly acclaimed series The Kingkiller Chronicle, beginning with Rothfuss' debut novel, The Name of the Wind (2007), which won several awards, and continuing in the sequel, The Wise Man's Fear (2011), which topped The New York Times Best Seller list.
Joseph Edward Abercrombie is a British fantasy writer and film editor. He is the author of The First Law trilogy, as well as other fantasy books in the same setting and a trilogy of young adult novels. His novel Half a King won the 2015 Locus Award for best young adult book.
Daniel Andrew Wells is an American horror and science fiction author. Wells's first published novel, I Am Not a Serial Killer, was adapted into a movie in 2016.
Larry Correia is an American fantasy and science fiction writer, known for his Monster Hunter International, Grimnoir Chronicles, and Saga of the Forgotten Warrior series. He has authored or co-authored over 25 novels, has over 50 published short works, two collections of stories, and has co-edited three published anthologies.
Nora Keita Jemisin is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. Her fiction includes a wide range of themes, notably cultural conflict and oppression. Her debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and the subsequent books in her Inheritance Trilogy received critical acclaim. She has won several awards for her work, including the Locus Award. The three books of her Broken Earth series made her the first author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in three consecutive years, as well as the first to win for all three novels in a trilogy. She won a fourth Hugo Award, for Best Novelette, in 2020 for Emergency Skin. Jemisin was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellows Program Genius Grant in 2020.
Brad R. Torgersen is an American science fiction author whose short stories regularly appear in various anthologies and magazines, including Analog Science Fiction and Fact and Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show.
Ann Leckie is an American author of science fiction and fantasy. Her 2013 debut novel Ancillary Justice, in part about artificial consciousness and gender-blindness, won the 2014 Hugo Award for "Best Novel", as well as the Nebula Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the BSFA Award. The sequels, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy, each won the Locus Award and were nominated for the Nebula Award. Provenance, published in 2017, and Translation State, published in 2023, are also set in the Imperial Radch universe. Leckie's first fantasy novel, The Raven Tower, was published in February 2019.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a Mexican and Canadian novelist, short story writer, editor, and publisher.
Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani speculative fiction author. His short fiction has been published in magazines and books such as The Apex Book of World SF, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, Black Static, and in a number of "year's best" anthologies. He is the first Pakistani to win the Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction (2014) and has won the British Fantasy Award (2016). He has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award (2016), nominated again for the Stoker Award (2018), has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award, and has been nominated for multiple Locus Awards.
R.R. Virdi is an American urban fantasy author. Two of his novels have been nominated for a Dragon Award: Grave Measures in 2016 and Dangerous Ways in 2017. His novelette, "Messenger", was nominated for a Nebula Award in 2019.
Sam J. Miller is an American science fiction, fantasy and horror short fiction author. His stories have appeared in publications such as Clarkesworld, Asimov's Science Fiction, and Lightspeed, along with over 15 "year's best" story collections. He was finalist for multiple Nebula Awards along with the World Fantasy and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. He won the 2013 Shirley Jackson Award for his short story "57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides." His debut novel, The Art of Starving, was published in 2017 and his novel Blackfish City won the 2019 John W. Campbell Memorial Award.
The Dragon Awards are a set of literary and media awards voted on by fandom and presented annually since 2016 by Dragon Con for excellence in various categories of science fiction, fantasy, and horror in various media — novels, movies, television, and games.
Fonda Lee is a Canadian-American author of speculative fiction. She is best known for writing The Green Bone Saga, the first of which, Jade City, won the 2018 World Fantasy Award and was named one of the 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time by Time magazine. The Green Bone Saga was also included on NPR's list, "50 Favorite Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of the Past Decade".
David John Butler is an American speculative fiction author. His epic flintlock fantasy novel Witchy Kingdom won the Dragon Award for Best Alternate History Novel in 2020. Witchy Winter won the 2018 AML Award for Best Novel and the 2018 Whitney Award for Best Speculative Fiction, and Witchy Eye was a preliminary nominee for the Gemmell Morningstar Award.
House of Assassins is a 2019 epic fantasy novel by Larry Correia and published by Baen Books. It is the second book in the Saga of the Forgotten Warrior series and a sequel to Son of the Black Sword. It was followed by Destroyer of Worlds in 2020. It won Best Fantasy Novel at the 2019 Dragon Awards and was nominated for a 2019 Whitney Award.
