Urban fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy, placing supernatural elements in a contemporary urban setting. The combination provides the writer with a platform for classic fantasy tropes, quixotic plot-elements, and unusual characters—without demanding the creation of an entire imaginary world.
Peter Soyer Beagle is an American novelist and screenwriter, especially of fantasy fiction. His best-known work is The Last Unicorn (1968) which Locus subscribers voted the number five "All-Time Best Fantasy Novel" in 1987. During the last twenty-five years he has won several literary awards, including a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2011. He was named Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master by SFWA in 2018.
Barbara Hambly is an American novelist and screenwriter within the genres of fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and historical fiction. She is the author of the bestselling Benjamin January mystery series featuring a free man of color, a musician and physician, in New Orleans in the antebellum years. She also wrote a novel about Mary Todd Lincoln.
Kelly Link is an American editor and writer. Mainly known as an author of short stories, she published her first novel The Book of Love in 2024. While some of her fiction falls more clearly within genre categories, many of her stories might be described as slipstream or magic realism: a combination of science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and literary fiction. Among other honors, she has won a Hugo Award, three Nebula Awards, and a World Fantasy Award for her fiction, and she was one of the recipients of the 2018 MacArthur "Genius" Grant.
Martha Wells is an American writer of speculative fiction. She has published a number of fantasy novels, young adult novels, media tie-ins, short stories, and nonfiction essays on fantasy and science fiction subjects. Her novels have been translated into twelve languages. Wells has won four Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards and three Locus Awards for her science fiction series The Murderbot Diaries. She is also known for her fantasy series Ile-Rien and The Books of the Raksura. Wells is praised for the complex, realistically detailed societies she creates; this is often credited to her academic background in anthropology.
Sarah Rees Brennan is an Irish writer best known for young adult fantasy fiction. Her first novel, The Demon's Lexicon, was released June 2009 by Simon & Schuster. Rees Brennan's books are bestsellers in both the UK and USA.
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, and a fifth Hugo Award, for Best Graphic Story, in 2022 for Far Sector. Jemisin was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellows Program Genius Grant in 2020.
Amal El-Mohtar is a Canadian poet and writer of speculative fiction. She has published short fiction, poetry, essays and reviews, and has edited the fantastic poetry quarterly magazine Goblin Fruit since 2006.
All the Birds in the Sky is a 2016 science fantasy novel by American writer and editor Charlie Jane Anders. It is her debut speculative fiction novel and was first published in January 2016 in the United States by Tor Books. The book is about a witch and a techno-geek, their troubled relationship, and their attempts to save the world from disaster. The publisher described the work as "blending literary fantasy and science fiction".
Rebecca F. Kuang is an American fantasy novelist. Her first novel, The Poppy War, was released in 2018, followed by the sequels The Dragon Republic in 2019, and The Burning God in 2020. Kuang released a stand-alone novel, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence in 2022. Her latest release is Yellowface, a satirical novel which was published in 2023. Kuang holds an undergraduate degree in international economics with a minor in Asian Studies from Georgetown University and graduate degrees in Sinology from Magdalene College, Cambridge, and University College, Oxford, and is currently pursuing a PhD at Yale University.
Rivers Solomon is an American author of speculative and literary fiction. In 2018, they received the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses' Firecracker Award in Fiction for their debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, and in 2020 their second novel, The Deep, won the Lambda Literary Award. Their third novel, Sorrowland, was published in May 2021, and won the Otherwise Award.
The Bear and the Nightingale is a historical fantasy novel written by Katherine Arden, published in 2017 by Del Rey Books. It is Arden's debut novel, and the first novel in the Winternight trilogy.
Black Leopard, Red Wolf is a 2019 fantasy novel by Jamaican writer Marlon James. It is the first book of the Dark Star Trilogy. The novel draws on African history and mythology, blended into the landscape of the North Kingdom and the South Kingdom, and the political tensions between these two warring states, as well as various city-states and tribes in the surrounding landscape. The rights to produce a film adaptation were purchased by Michael B. Jordan in February 2019 prior to release of the book.
Trail of Lightning is a 2018 fantasy novel, the debut novel by Rebecca Roanhorse. After a supernatural disaster destroys most of North America, Navajo monster-slayer Maggie Hoskie must navigate a world of monsters and gods. The novel won the 2019 Locus Award for Best First Novel and was nominated for the Hugo, World Fantasy, and Nebula awards.
Witchmark is a 2018 fantasy novel by Canadian author C. L. Polk. It features a murder mystery set in a secondary world in a country called Aeland, and has been described as gaslamp fantasy. Witchmark won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 2019. It was first published by Tor Books.
Lent is a 2019 fantasy novel by Jo Walton, about Girolamo Savonarola. It was first published by Tor Books, and was nominated for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award.
Gideon the Ninth is a 2019 science fantasy novel by the New Zealand writer Tamsyn Muir. It is Muir's debut novel and the first in her The Locked Tomb series, followed by Harrow the Ninth (2020), Nona the Ninth (2022), and the upcoming Alecto the Ninth.
Interference is a 2019 science fiction novel by American writer and translator Sue Burke. It is the second novel of her Semiosis Trilogy series, the first being Semiosis (2018). Interference was first published in October 2019 in the United States by Tor Books. The novel takes place on the planet Pax about 100 years after the events in Semiosis when a new expedition from Earth arrives.
The Craft Sequence is a series of urban fantasy novels by American author Max Gladstone. It currently consists of six novels, beginning with Three Parts Dead (2012). The sequence received critical acclaim. It was nominated for the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Series.
Spear is a 2022 fantasy novella by Nicola Griffith. Drawing on Arthurian mythos, the book refashions the story of Percival and the Holy Grail but makes the character of Percival a woman. The protagonist of Griffith's version is Peretur, a girl raised alone in the wilderness by her mother, who develops a magical ability to communicate with animals. She sets out to explore the world dressed as a boy and seeks to join the service of King Arturus as a knight. At his court she becomes involved with his search for the Holy Grail and discovers that her own heritage is connected to it.
