The 2026 Ignyte Award finalists have been announced, and we’re thrilled to see some DMLA names on the list!
Outstanding Novel: Adult
Outstanding Novelette
The Ember Award
(for unsung contributions to genre)
This world is round. Loving sailors court its waves, bathe in sea currents happily sharing secrets with them, waters telling them where to go and how best to navigate their way. With persistence as gentle and stubborn as worn stones, multiple award winner Vonda N. McIntyre shows us versions of everyday Minoan activities based on common sense and historical research, then flings us outward from that safe harbor into the wildest of adventures. Monsters, volcanoes, pirates, mummy kings—all these dangers must be passed as ambassador and former bull-dancer Iakinthu travels thousands of miles on a mission to return her foster son to his Pacific coast home.
Vonda treats the whole enterprise of bringing her last novel to life with the calm assurance of a favorite aunt taking you shopping in the best sex toy store ever. Sensory delights abound, from the soothing oil massaged into bathers’ skins to the cool mountain breezes buoying up ship-burdened balloons. The most audacious realities rise and ebb beneath her steady yet unobtrusive attention. We readers of The Curve of the World are truly fortunate to have such an elegant inevitability of a story so beautifully unfolded here before us.
On the battlefield, as warring factions deal out death, young Mercutio chances upon the charismatic poet Dante Alighieri. In their desperate stand against the enemy, they inadvertently open a crack between our world and Faerie, literally changing the stars over Mercutio’s head, and creating a mysterious presence who will follow Mercutio for all the days of his life.
With new stars come new destinies for young men who will travel to the ends of the Earth to honour the bonds of love and friendship.
As outcasts and exiles, Mercutio and Dante find family in a band of fighters called the Montecchi, near Verona. With his friends at his side, Mercutio will battle to change his stars, and to free the changeling upon whose fate hangs the future of the human world.
The 2026 Locus Award Finalists were announced and we’re thrilled to see so many DMLA authors included!
SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS
FANTASY NOVELS
HORROR NOVELS
FIRST NOVELS
NOVELLAS
NOVELETTES
SHORT STORIES
COLLECTION
Congratulations to all the DMLA authors whose titles were named a GoodReads Editor’s Top Genre Pick for the past five years!
Fantasy
Horror
Publishers Weekly: A gentle elegiac tone pervades this stunning posthumous historical fantasy from multi–Hugo and Nebula award winner McIntyre (Dreamsnake), who died in 2019. In ancient Crete, Iakinthu, a former bull dancer, is at the apex of her second profession as chief diplomat-trader of her seafaring nation. To fulfill Minoan tradition, she must take her adopted son, Rhenthizu, to meet his birth mother in a faraway land no Minoan has ever visited, after which he will choose which woman to live with. Their epic journey plays out as a feminist odyssey through six distinctive and mostly matriarchal cultures, superbly constructed around permutations of myth and legend. McIntyre’s scene-setting is lush and immersive, and her finely drawn, women-led cast leaps off the page as they confront obstacles with wit and wisdom. This sensitive and captivating voyage of discovery is a fitting capstone to a remarkable career. (May)
Congratulations to Neil Sharpson as his book DON’T TRUST FISH wins the 2026 Indies Choice Book Award in the Children’s Picture Book category!
Tension simmers across the Nine Lands. In the capital, the people of Lordsgrave seethe with resentment after the horrors of the greyblood attack. Clan Adatali is in open rebellion against the king, and as war in the Feverlands rages on, a humble tree feller—who looks a lot like missing invoker Jinao Mizito—has not forgotten the promise he made to avenge his brother.
Meanwhile, in the shadows, the king’s daughter Lyela continues to move her pieces across the board. Can the people of the Nine Lands reclaim their stolen history and unlock the secrets that have been kept from them for centuries?
When Poppy Hill was a child she was stolen from her family’s Montana homestead and taken to the land of the fae, where she spent more than a century as a cook in the Wild King’s castle. Now back in the human world, she works for a company that brokers fairy bargains, looking for loopholes in their contracts.
Then a bargain that Poppy is negotiating goes disastrously wrong and she has to return to the world she grew up in to try to rectify her mistake, facing danger, intrigue and a pesky ex-boyfriend along the way.
Publishers Weekly: McCarty’s elegant and melancholy fantasy debut follows Poppy Hill, who in 1880, at the age of five, was abducted by faeries and taken to their world, called Otherside, where she grew up and became a cook for the Wild King. She was then returned to the human world in the modern day as a woman in her late 20s. Poppy now works as a consultant for the Montana branch of law firm Carter Lane, which negotiates contracts between humans who want extraordinary abilities and Otherside agents, who grant them—for a price. Her specialty is scrutinizing contracts for loopholes that Otherside can exploit. The plot kicks into gear when Poppy botches a case involving German anthropologist Gabriele Albrecht, who wants to trade her sense of taste for the ability to speak every human language, not catching a loophole that results in Gabriele being bound to serve seven years in Otherside. Now Poppy must return to Otherside to rescue Gabriele, risking her safety, her job, and her friends in both worlds. This desperate quest leads her into negotiations with her former lover, Elan, and a plot to depose a king. Wistful and witty with exquisite worldbuilding, McCarty’s sprawling epic challenges notions of identity, loyalty, and the places one calls home. It’s a thrilling start.