The winners of the 2025 World Fantasy Awards, announced during the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton, England:
Novel: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey)
Novella: Yoke of Stars by R.B. Lemberg (Tachyon Publishing)
Short Fiction: "Raptor" by Maura McHugh, in Heartwood: A Mythago Wood Anthology
Collection: A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories by Mariana Enriquez, trans. by Megan McDowell (Hogarth)
Artist: Liv Rainey-Smith
Special Award, Professional: Mapping New Stars: A Sourcebook on Philippine Speculative Fiction by Gabriela Lee, Anna Felicia Sanchez, Sydney Paige Guerrero (University of the Philippines Press)
Special Award, Non-Professional: Steve J. Shaw, for Black Shuck Books
Life Achievement: Juliet Marillier and Michael Whelan
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Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War by Lyndal Roper (Basic Books) has won the 2025 Cundill History Prize, administered by McGill University. Roper receives $75,000.
Organizers praised this "sensational account of the sixteenth-century uprising that shook Europe to its core. The first history of the German Peasants' War in a generation, and told through the voices of the peasants themselves, Summer of Fire and Blood uncovers the far-reaching ramifications of this doomed rebellion. Though the victors portrayed the uprising as naive and chaotic, Roper instead reveals a coherent mass movement inspired by the radical principles of the Protestant Reformation. Her deeply researched account shows that the uprising was one that expressed early ideas of justice, communal decision-making, and resistance to arbitrary power."
Jury chair Ada Ferrer, a professor of history at Princeton University and 2022 Cundill History Prize finalist, called Summer of Fire and Blood "a gripping history of the German peasant rebellions of 1524-1525, the largest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. At the centre of her history are the peasants themselves. Roper traces the emergence, unfolding and eventual undoing of the rebellion and offers a vivid and compelling portrait of the peasants' world. Through this lens, she delivers a history of the Reformation from the ground up--as it was lived and understood by the ordinary people, who often interpreted its message as far more radical than envisioned by its architects. Her analysis is stunning and multifaceted, seamlessly weaving together cultural, intellectual, social, economic and religious history into a rich and engaging narrative."