In 2011, as a memorial to its founding President Dr Allan Lloyd Smith (1945-2010), the International Gothic Association established the Allan Lloyd Smith Memorial Prize, to be awarded for a scholarly publication considered to have significantly advanced the field of Gothic studies.

In 2024, the International Gothic Association inaugurated a new prize to honour the memory of Justin D. Edwards (1970-2023), past co-president of the IGA and beloved colleague and friend. The Justin D. Edwards Memorial Prize is to be awarded for an edited collection considered to have significantly advanced the field of Gothic studies.

For the current round of nominations, monographs and edited collections published between January 1st 2024 to December 31st 2025 are eligible.

We are delighted to announce that there will be £100 awarded for each prize.

We are now accepting nominations, and each IGA member is entitled to nominate for either or both prizes. Anyone wishing to nominate a book who is not yet an IGA member may join the Association here.

Nominations for the prizes need to be received no later than 23:59 (GMT) on Monday 2nd March 2026.

Nominations for either award should be submitted online here. Please note that self-nominations will not be accepted. Any queries regarding eligibility should be sent to the Chair at j.crawford@exeter.ac.uk.

The Chair for the 2026 prize panel is Professor Joseph Crawford (University of Exeter). A panel of past Presidents and winners will assess the nominations before drawing up a shortlist that will be published on the IGA website. The panel reserves the right not to make an award should no nominated work satisfy the criteria of the Prize.

Nominations may be submitted only by individual members of the IGA, though nominated works do not have to have been published by a member of the Association. Short articles, individual chapters in longer volumes, original fiction and poetry are not eligible, though scholarly (i.e., introduced, annotated and resourced) editions of Gothic texts may be considered.

The panel will advise the serving Co-Presidents of their decision on the winner prior to the IGA conference, which, this year, is hosted at the University of Hull, July 28-31.

The prizes will be presented (or, if a winning author is not present, announced) during the conference.

For the majority of children of my generation, cartoon villainy was the early-years introduction to the Gothic. However, I was, for a long time and no discernable reason, dead against the cinema. My first introduction to the Gothic was therefore not film, but television.

No genre or mode offered more to the fare of animated children’s television in the early noughties than the Gothic. At a time of relative global safety and prosperity, we found ourselves attracted to the safe degeneracy of animated baddies – they gave us a way to act out our desire to push the boundaries with such exaggeration that it posed no threat, real or imagined, and I loved every second of it.

Of the animated series which introduced me to the colourful possibilities of the Gothic, The Care Bears Family (1986-1988) was the first to strike a chord. Its second episode introduces Lord No Heart, the misanthropic wizard who acts as an antagonist throughout the series, and every bit the animated Goth. He even lives in a castle inside a storm cloud!

Is that a little on the nose? Perhaps, but that’s the beauty of children’s Gothic, particularly on television when settings and characters can change week by week. Animation, too, gave this series and others after it limitless possibilities to employ monstrosity and the supernatural to Gothic effect. In short, we can do away with subtlety in favour of dramatic images of isolated castles and dreams of world domination.

My early obsession did not stop there, however. Once I saw how engaging the ‘dark side’ of animated TV could be, I saw it everywhere, from Scooby-Doo (1969 – present) to Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1999).

The Gothic witch as a stock figure became a particular source of fascination for my young self. While Sabrina leaned more towards camp as an aesthetic, the Gothic really came into its own in a series which, arguably, is far more camp and ‘cosy’: My Little Pony (1986-1987).

The witch Hydia first appears in the series’ first ten episodes, a powerful woman who transgresses boundaries of this gendered world, in which its protagonists (almost all female) advance a soft-spoken, community-based femininity. Her ultimate goal is to make the world ‘dark and dreary’ to match her home and tastes, turning Hydia from a stock antagonist into a Gothic-inspired shadow in this otherwise pastel-perfect world.

Now, as an early-career researcher in the Gothic, this first introduction to what would become a professional interest has stuck with me. I can trace the writing I am now fascinated by – women’s Gothic and folk and fairy tales, as well as the literature of traditional witchcraft – to the witches and sorcerers and scoundrels of children’s television.

I was no older than five when I came across the Gothic for the first time, but even then, it caught my attention like nothing else. It remains a hugely fruitful field that speaks to a child’s sense of adventure and discovery – and a desire to be a little bit wicked.