Locus Awards 2025: Boldizar and Kingfisher take the novel prizes
The 2025 Locus Awards went to Alexander Boldizar for science fiction and T. Kingfisher for fantasy, with Chuck Tingle winning horror.
The Locus Science Fiction Foundation announced the winners of the 2025 Locus Awards on 21 June during its Locus Awards Weekend. The awards are decided by a readers' poll run by Locus magazine.
Best science fiction novel went to The Man Who Saw Seconds by Alexander Boldizar, and best fantasy novel to A Sorceress Comes to Call by T. Kingfisher. Chuck Tingle won best horror novel for Bury Your Gays, and Yoon Ha Lee's Moonstorm won the young adult category. The first novel award went to John Wiswell's Someone You Can Build a Nest In, which had won the Nebula for best novel two weeks earlier.
Because the Locus Awards are open to readers rather than limited to convention members or professional writers, they tend to reflect what the genre's committed audience has actually been reading.
For writers, the overlap between lists is worth noting. Wiswell's novel won both a peer-voted award and a reader-voted one in the same month, and the first novel category continues to give debut authors a separate route to recognition rather than setting them directly against established names.