- Winning Story 2025
The Smogline
by Zohaib Bilal
Its origins were uncertain, argued about by scholars and charlatans alike. Some claimed the first observance occurred a thousand years ago, when the sky had cleared after the Long Smoke, and a single shaft of sunlight pierced the veil over a broken capital. Others said it began far earlier, when desert prophets or mountain cults worshipped the fire in the sky. It didn’t matter. History had calcified into myth, and myth had been monetized.
Finalists
| The Calligrapher of the Forgotten | Threadbare |
|---|---|
|
by Fariah Ansari |
by Amna Ahmad |
Honorable Mentions
| The Weight of Water | Before the End |
|---|---|
|
by Sarah Imran |
by Zoya Surayya Ansari |
Judges for 2025
Sam J. Miller
Sam J. Miller’s books have been called “must reads” and “bests of the year” by USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, and O: The Oprah Magazine, among others. They’ve also been banned in Florida, and stolen by AI belonging to billionaires.
His short fiction has been published in places like The Kenyon Review, Vogue Italia, Tor.com, Asimov’s, and more. He’s received the Nebula, Locus, and Shirley Jackson Awards. He’s also the last in a long line of butchers. Sam lives in New York City, and at samjmiller.com
Roshani Chokshi
Roshani Chokshi is the award-winning author of the New York Times bestselling series The Star-Touched Queen, The Gilded Wolvesand Aru Shah and The End of Time, which Time Magazine named one of the Top 100 Fantasy Books of All Time. Chokshi’s adult debut, The Last Tale of The Flower Bride, was a #1 Sunday Times bestseller. Her novels have been translated into more than two dozen languages and often draw upon world mythology and folklore. Chokshi is a member of the National Leadership Board for the Michael C. Carlos Museum and lives in Georgia with her family. Visit her online at roshanichokshi.com and on Instagram at @roshanichokshi.
Kristine Ong Muslim
Kristine Ong Muslim is an author, anthologist, and translator living in a small farmhouse in Sitio Magutay, a remote rural highland area in the southern Philippine province of Maguindanao. Her books include The Drone Outside (Eibonvale Press, 2017), Black Arcadia (University of the Philippines Press, 2017), Meditations of a Beast (Cornerstone Press, 2016), Butterfly Dream (Snuggly Books, 2016), Age of Blight (Unnamed Press, 2016), and several other collections of fiction and poetry. She co-edited Signos: Anthology of 21st Century Filipino Fiction on Dark Lore and the Supernatural (Radix Media, forthcoming 2025), Destination: SEA 2050 A.D. (Penguin Random House SEA, 2022), Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines (Gaudy Boy, 2021), and the British Fantasy Award-winning People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! (2016). Her translation of Amado Anthony G. Mendoza III’s novel, Book of the Damned, won a 2023 PEN/Heim grant. She is also the translator of at least nine books by Filipino authors Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, Rogelio Braga, and Marlon Hacla. Widely anthologized, Muslim’s short stories were published in Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, and World Literature Today and translated into Bulgarian, Czech, German, Japanese,
Judges for 2024
S.B. Divya
Max Gladstone
Hugo-, Nebula-, and Locus Award winning author Max Gladstone has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia and once wrecked a bicycle in Angkor Wat. He is the author of many books, including Empress of Forever, the Craft Sequence of fantasy novels, and, with Amal El-Mohtar, the internationally bestselling This is How You Lose the Time War. His dreams are much nicer than you’d expect.
