Ignyte Awards 2025 finalists announced

The Ignyte Awards 2025 finalists, the fifth edition of the award scheme, were announced on Monday, June 9, 2025.

Fiyah is a quarterly speculative fiction magazine featuring stories by and about Black people of the African Diaspora based in the USA, founded in 2016. In 2021, they announced that they would host FIYAHCON for Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) with the Ignyte Awards as its centrepiece. The awards were aimed at celebrating the vibrancy and diversity of the current and future landscapes of science fiction, fantasy, and horror by recognizing incredible feats in storytelling and outstanding efforts toward inclusivity of the genre. The awards have also been announced in 2022, 2023, and 2024.

The 2025 awards kicked off with the announcement of the finalists in the different categories, with the following writers of African descent making the cut;

Outstanding Novel: Adult

• Womb City, Tlotlo Tsamaase (Erewhon)
• Blackheart Man, Nalo Hopkinson (Saga)

Outstanding Novel: YA (Young Adult)

• The Poisons We Drink, Bethany Baptiste (Sourcebooks Fire)

Outstanding Middle Grade

• Amari and the Despicable Wonders, B.B. Alston (Storytide)
• The Creepening of Dogwood House, Eden Royce (Walden Pond)

Outstanding Novella

• Lost Ark Dreaming, Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Tordotcom)
• The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, Sofia Samatar (Tordotcom)

Outstanding Novelette

• A Stranger Knocks, Tananarive Due (Uncanny 9-10/24)
• We Who Will Not Die, Shingai Njeri Kagunda (Psychopomp 9/30/24)

Outstanding Speculative Poetry

• Hijacked Interiors, leena aboutaleb (Strange Horizons 1/1/24)
• reliving: post trauma of the lekki tollgate massacre., Fasasi Ridwan (Strange Horizons 12/16/24)

Outstanding Anthology/Collected Works

• The Black Girl Survives in This One, Desiree S. Evans & Saraciea J. Fennell, eds. (Flatiron)

Outstanding Creative Nonfiction

• Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction, Eugen Bacon, ed. (Bloomsbury Academic)
• Flamboyants: The Queer Harlem Renaissance I Wish I’d Known, George M. Johnson, illustrated by Charley Palmer (Farrar, Straus, Giroux)
• All Insurrections Are Not Created Equal: On Writing Resistance After January 6th, Micaiah Johnson (Reactor 10/29/24)

Public voting for the winners is open now through August 15, 2025. Click here to vote for the best writers in their categories.