The Horror Writers Association has announced the winners of the 2025 Bram Stoker Awards, presented at a gala banquet on June 6, 2026, during StokerCon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Stephen Graham Jones took the novel prize, Ryan Coogler won the screenplay award for Sinners and John Langan and A.C. Wise shared the long fiction category in a tie.
Jones’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, published by Saga Press and Titan Books, claimed Superior Achievement in a Novel, defeating titles by Grady Hendrix, Joe Hill, Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Wendy N. Wagner. Coogler’s Sinners, released through Warner Bros., won the screenplay category ahead of entries from Alex Garland’s 28 Years Later and Zach Cregger’s Weapons.
The long fiction category produced a tie between Nathan Ballingrud’s Cathedral of the Drowned and A.C. Wise’s “Wolf Moon, Antler Moon,” published in Reactor. John Langan’s Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions (Word Horde) won the fiction collection award.
•The winners/bramstokerawards.horror.orgMichael Wehunt took the first novel prize for The October Film Haunt (St. Martin’s Press), while Kristy Park Kulski’s Silk & Sinew: A Collection of Folk Horror from the Asian Diaspora (Bad Hand Books) won the anthology category. Mike Mignola’s Bowling With Corpses and Other Tales from Lands Unknown claimed the graphic novel award.
In poetry, Linda D. Addison and Jamal Hodge’s Everything Endless won the collection and long form category. Delilah S. Dawson’s Ride or Die (Delacorte Press) won the middle grade novel award and Clay McLeod Chapman’s Shiny Happy People (Delacorte Press) took the young adult novel prize.
The non-fiction awards went to Becky Siegel Spratford’s edited volume Why I Love Horror (Saga Press) for long non-fiction and to Tananarive Due’s essay “My Long Road to Horror,” drawn from the same anthology for short non-fiction. RJ Joseph’s short story “Inheritance” won Superior Achievement in Short Fiction.
Among the specialty awards, Lisa Morton and Jonathan Maberry received Lifetime Achievement honours. Marc L. Abbott was presented with the Richard Laymon President’s Award, Sarah Read received the Karen Lansdale Silver Hammer Award and Eric Guignard was named Mentor of the Year. Bad Hand Books received the Specialty Press Award.
The ceremony was livestreamed on the Horror Writers Association’s YouTube channel.
