Sierra Greer's Annie Bot wins the Arthur C. Clarke Award
Annie Bot by Sierra Greer, published by The Borough Press, won the 2025 Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction.
The 2025 Arthur C. Clarke Award, the UK's prize for the best science fiction novel first published in Britain in the previous year, went to Annie Bot by Sierra Greer. The winner was announced at a ceremony in London on 25 June 2025. The book is published by The Borough Press.
The novel is narrated in the first person by a robot built to be a perfect companion, and follows her attempts to become free. Greer receives £2,025 and an engraved commemorative bookend, in keeping with the award's custom of matching the prize money to the year.
The judges are drawn from the British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation and the SCI-FI-LONDON film festival, with Andrew M. Butler as non-voting chair. The award director, Tom Hunter, described the shortlist as concerned with planetary crisis, non-human intelligence and technology out of control.
The Clarke is among the few genre prizes whose eligibility is defined by UK publication, so it is a useful guide to what British publishers are putting out in science fiction. Annie Bot also shows the reach of a close, character-led novel about artificial intelligence, a subject that is easy to treat abstractly and harder to make personal.