World Fantasy Convention & Award

What happened

On the Halloween weekend of 1975 — 31 October to 2 November — writers, editors, artists, and collectors gathered at the Holiday Inn in Providence, Rhode Island. The choice of city was pointed. Providence was the home of H. P. Lovecraft, and the first World Fantasy Convention took "The Lovecraft Circle" as its theme, celebrating the writers who had orbited Lovecraft in the pages of Weird Tales half a century before. The event had been conceived by the writer T. E. D. Klein, the literary agent Kirby McCauley, and several others; McCauley chaired it, and the New Yorker and Playboy cartoonist Gahan Wilson served as toastmaster.

Wilson also designed the prize handed out that weekend: a bust of Lovecraft drawn out into one of his own long-faced caricatures, which winners came to call the "Howard." The first World Fantasy Award for Best Novel went to Patricia A. McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, and the first Life Achievement award to Robert Bloch, a member of the very Lovecraft circle being honored. Later Life Achievement winners in the early years included Fritz Leiber (1976), Ray Bradbury (1977), Jorge Luis Borges (1979), and C. L. Moore (1981); in 1984 the award was shared among five veterans, among them Jack Vance and L. Sprague de Camp.

The convention was designed from the start as something different from the fan-run science-fiction worldcons. It was aimed at professionals and serious collectors: a place for publishing people to meet, with panels, an art show, a dealers' room, and a mass autograph session, with far less of the costumed spectacle of fan conventions. It moved to a different city each year, usually in late October or early November, and occasionally abroad — Ottawa in 1984, London in 1988 and 1997, Montreal in 2001, Toronto in 2012, and Brighton in 2013 and again in 2025.

Why it mattered

In the mid-1970s fantasy was booming on paperback racks — the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series series had just finished reprinting the classics, and The Sword of Shannara was about to prove the mass market for new epics — but the genre still lived as a lodger in science fiction's house. The World Fantasy Convention and its awards gave fantasy and its sibling, horror, a professional center of gravity of their own. The awards cover novels, novellas, short fiction, collections, anthologies, and artists, plus special awards for professional and non-professional contributions; convention members nominate, and a rotating panel of five judges picks the finalists and winners.

Because the judges are free to range across the field, the roll of winners reads like an argument about what fantasy is. It honored weird fiction and horror from the start — Richard Matheson's Bid Time Return won in 1976 — alongside Michael Moorcock's Gloriana (1979) and Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness (1978). It embraced literary fantasy well beyond the genre shelves, giving Best Novel to Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell in 2005 and Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore in 2006. Life Achievement awards went to Ursula K. Le Guin (1995), Moorcock (2000), Terry Pratchett (2010), Peter S. Beagle (2011), and Susan Cooper (2013).

Legacy

The Lovecraft bust became the convention's great test of conscience. In 2011 the winners Nnedi Okorafor and China Miéville said they felt conflicted about accepting a likeness of a writer whose racism is plain in his letters and fiction. In 2014 the author Daniel José Older launched a petition to replace it, and Sofia Samatar raised the issue in her acceptance speech that year. At the 2015 ceremony organizers announced the bust would be retired. Its successor, designed by the sculptor Vincent Villafranca, shows a gnarled tree in front of a full moon — imagery meant to evoke the night and the forest that run through myth, fantasy, and horror alike.

Half a century on, the convention still moves from city to city; the 2020 edition, planned for Salt Lake City, was held online during the pandemic, and the 2026 convention is scheduled for Oakland, California, on 22–25 October. It remains smaller and more businesslike than fan juggernauts such as Dragon Con or Gen Con, and its award, alongside the Hugo and Nebula, is still one of the honors a fantasy writer most hopes to be handed.