This year we had 13 books longlisted across the two prizes. The Monographs prize committee, in alphabetical order, comprised Professor Joseph Crawford (chair), Professor Carol Davison, Professor Bill Hughes, Professor Marie Mulvey-Roberts, Professor Andrew Smith, and Professor Angela Wright. The Edited Collections committee comprised Professor Joseph Crawford (chair), Professor Rebecca Duncan, Professor Jason Haslam, Professor Karen Macfarlane, Professor Robert Miles, and Professor Catherine Spooner. Tremendous thanks are also due to Alexia Mandla Ainsworth for all her painstaking work as Secretary of the prize and liaison with publishers.

Before announcing the shortlists, we would like to congratulate every single author on the longlist. The books submitted this year were extremely strong, and our judges were highly impressed by the quality of work from all our long-listed authors and editors!

The shortlisted works in each prize are as follows.

Shortlist for the Allan Lloyd Smith Prize 2026 for a monograph best advancing the field of gothic studies, in alphabetical order:

• David Ashford, A Book of Monsters: Promethean Horror in Modern Literature and Culture (Manchester University Press, 2024)
• Emma McEvoy, The Music of the Gothic, 1789-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
• Dale Townshend, Matthew Gregory Lewis: The Gothic and Romantic Literary Culture (University of Wales Press, 2024)

Shortlist for the Justin D. Edwards Prize 2026 for an edited collection best advancing the field of gothic studies, in alphabetical order:

• Barbara Chamberlin, Julia Round, and Kom Kunyosying, eds., Horror and Comics (University of Wales Press, 2025)
• Carol Margaret Davison, ed., Gothic Dreams and Nightmares (Manchester University Press, 2024)
• Sam George and Bill Hughes, eds., The Legacy of John Polidori: The Romantic Vampire and its Progeny (Manchester University Press, 2024)
• Nick Groom and William Hughes, eds., The Vampire: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2025)
• Andrew Smith, ed., The Victorian Ghost Story: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2025)

The Prizes will be announced at the IGA Conference at the University of Hull, July 28-31 2026. If a prize winner is not present at the conference, the Chair will contact them by email after the awards announcement. After the conference has ended, a blog post will also celebrate the prize winners.

Congratulations to all the shortlisted authors!

The film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining and I entered the world in the same year, and I started watching horror films at the tender age of four or five (thanks to a mischievous teenaged auntie and cable television). However, I wouldn’t consider any of that a first encounter with the Gothic. My relationship with the Gothic is something inherited from folklore, family, and the landscapes that raised me.

I’ve lived in England my entire adult life, but I grew up in Appalachian Ohio. The area was rich with eerie folklore: haunted cemeteries, cursed roads, the shadowy rumours of a cult living near the covered bridge. A dreamy, solitary child, I took the idea of living with spectres much further than necessary – every barn, shed, closet, creepy doll, cellar, dirt road, and stand of trees I came across was obviously haunted.

Stories of ancestors from other parts of Appalachia filtered down to me through grandparents. One distant grandmother smoked a pipe and lived in a ghost-filled house with heavy velvet curtains she always kept closed. Another, my grandpa’s beloved mother, was a granny woman – an herbalist who could cure myriad ailments with the right blends of local plants, and it was said she often knew about things before they happened. She understood birth and death, and how inseparable our lives are from the latter. My grandpa inherited her fearless acceptance of the unknown, and did his best to pass it down to me.

I went camping and fishing with my grandpa from a very young age, and whenever we heard a bobcat scream, he’d tell me it was ‘a wampus kitty’ – an uncanny human-cat chimera belonging to the mountains and woods of his East Tennessee childhood. He told me plenty about less mythical animals, too – raccoons, opossums, and yes, bobcats – but the lesson was easy to accept: there are creatures around us, natural or otherwise, and we have to respect them.

It was inevitable that by middle school I’d be winding my bookworm way around literature with Gothic elements, even if I didn’t know what the Gothic was at the time: I read Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, and wanted to wander the wild Yorkshire moors of Wuthering Heights and The Secret Garden. Little did I know Yorkshire would become my adopted second homeland, and later, as a twentysomething living in Sheffield, I discovered the writing of Daphne du Maurier, a master of unsettling fiction who also happened to adopt a second home – Cornwall.

Now, as a Yorkshire-Appalachian living in the West Midlands, my current postgraduate research thesis explores ecoGothic landscapes in Daphne du Maurier’s work, and the haunted relationship between the human and more-than-human world that often nests within those landscapes. Because I was raised on a particular homegrown, rural Gothic, I know there’s strangeness in the land if we allow ourselves to see it, there’s no life without death, and how to keep my heart open to mysterious things – wherever I happen to be at the time.

Unlike fear, my earliest encounters with the Gothic were marked by a sense of inscrutable sadness.

Long before I knew the term “gothic,” I was immersed in stories of monsters, ghosts, vampires, and other supernatural beings. As a child, I watched television adaptations of Journey to the West at my grandparents’ house, where the Monkey King battled shapeshifting monsters seeking the monk’s flesh to attain immortality. During middle and high school, I read incomplete online translations of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles and searched obsessively for vampire films, from Nosferatu and Dracula to Interview with the Vampire and Van Helsing. I borrowed books by Edgar Allan Poe from the local library and listened to friends’ stories about haunted mansions, abandoned amusement parks, and ghosts lingering in rural landscapes where I grew up.

Yet what puzzled me was that these stories rarely frightened me. Instead, they filled me with sorrow. Rather than accepting the narratives that doomed monstrous beings to destruction, I found myself imagining alternatives. While drawing the spider sisters, snake lady, and ox-elephant brothers from Journey to the West, I wondered why they desired the monk’s flesh and whether they had other choices. What histories shaped them? What suffering had they endured? Would immortality truly make them happy?

These questions haunted me. I felt an increasing sadness for creatures whose destinies seemed predetermined by erasure. As I became fascinated with vampires, that feeling deepened. Watching Nosferatu as a teenager, I felt drawn not to the heroes but to the lonely vampire inhabiting a decaying castle. The dilapidated architecture, the faded history, the longing for connection, and the film’s melancholic atmosphere all seemed profoundly sorrowful. In Interview with the Vampire, I wept for Lestat rather than Louis. In Van Helsing, I imagined a happy ending for Dracula and his brides. The nameless ghosts of rural folklore also inspired more sympathy than fear. If they truly existed, I wondered, could they somehow be helped? Was being a ghost inseparable from loss, solitude, and despair?

It was not until I began formally studying the Gothic that I came to terms with this recurring emotion. It dwelled on me that the sorrow might reveal something fundamental about the gothic mode itself. Gothic narratives stage decline, vulnerability, and tragedy while probing questions about existence, mortality, and meaning. Amid darkness, they illuminate truths that resist simple moral divisions.

That sorrow remains with me, but I no longer try to explain it away. Instead, I recognize it as a generative force behind my interest in gothic horror. It taught me that the value of the Gothic lies not only in comprehending what is fearful but also in exploring ethical relationships with radical alterity. Gothic narratives invite us to feel for beings deemed monstrous, to imagine alternatives to their destruction, and to challenge anthropocentric forms of justice grounded in exclusion and erasure. Rather than affirming violence, the Gothic has taught me a form of attentiveness that feels urgently relevant today: the capacity to extend tenderness toward beings radically different from ourselves.

My first encounter with the Gothic was an immersive experience. I came face-to-face with fear and fascination for the first time in a dream! I was seven at the time. One night, I lay awake thinking about the death of a character in a storybook. I wanted to know where the dead go. As I drifted in and out of sleep, a dream began to form.

I’m standing alone at the entrance of a cave. The cave looks dark and mysterious, beckoning me to enter. I climb in. I’m immediately surrounded by eerie colors – they’re coming from strange plants and creatures sprawled across the cave walls, exuding a supernatural glow. I hear hisses, growls, and whispers. Unnatural shadows and voices dance around me. Something stirs in the darkness. It’s restless and angry, and it’s coming toward me. I realize it’s a ghost! I run for my life…

I woke up scared and excited at the same time. For days afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about the dream. I sought answers from my parents, but they dismissed my encounter as a silly dream. Their disinterest triggered something explosive inside me. I sat down and turned my dream into a short story – the very first story I had ever written.

It wasn’t until many years later that I recognized my story’s Gothic trajectory: it has a complete arc with a dark beginning, middle, and end! There is a troubled protagonist, a disturbing inciting incident, a supernatural antagonist, a terrifying “rock bottom” moment (where the protagonist realizes he is going to die if he doesn’t fight back), and an epic battle between Good and Evil. Darkness, fear, rage, and despair infiltrate every line, along with blood and gore (definitely not PG-rated). In the end, my protagonist makes it out of the cave alive, but he is no longer the same person. I began to wonder if he emerges alone after all.

I realized I might have brought back a ghost with me that night.

My ghost stayed invisible until one day, it manifested during a very difficult time in my life when I had hit rock bottom. My ghost grew bigger and angrier. It finally leaped from the pages of my short story onto my graduate school application essay and dragged me straight to its writing program. My ghost whispered stories of deaths and rebirths into my ears. It told me to fight back with my blood and tears so I can rewrite my destiny. It commanded me to help others make sense of loss, grief, and pain through writing and teaching the Gothic. And this time, I faced the ghost instead of running away. I stared into its eyes, and I found myself.

I’ve been writing and advocating Gothic stories ever since. My first encounter with the Gothic was not only immersive but also transformative! I’m proud to say I’m no longer afraid of my ghost because now I know it has always been there to empower me!

Attention all graduate and postgraduate students (MA, MPhil, PhD, etc.!)

If you are attending the IGA Conference in Hull this summer, you are eligible to apply for a small travel bursary (£100) to assist with travel costs.

Please note that to apply, you must confirm that you are a current IGA member and that you have registered for the conference.

Please also note that the IGA will only be able to pay this out via PAYPAL (International) or Bank transfer (UK accounts only).

You can find the Postgraduate Student Bursary Application form here.

The deadline for applications is 31 May 2026.

We look forward to seeing you all in Hull at the end of July!

The IGA executive Team

Now that all nominations have been received and verified, it is a pleasure to announce the longlists for the two IGA book Prizes. Five monographs were nominated for the Alan Lloyd Smith prize, and eight essay collections were nominated for the Justin D. Edwards prize, with many books receiving multiple nominations. The resulting longlists are as follows:

Longlist for the Allan Lloyd Smith Prize for Best Monograph 2026:

• Dale Townshend, Matthew Gregory Lewis: The Gothic and Romantic Literary Culture (University of Wales Press, 2024)
• Emma McEvoy, The Music of the Gothic, 1789-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
• Rebecca Wynne-Walsh, New Basque Gothic (Manchester University Press, 2025)
• David Ashford, A Book of Monsters: Promethean Horror in Modern Literature and Culture (Manchester University Press, 2024)
• Joana Jacob Ramalho, Memory and the Gothic Aesthetic in Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

Longlist for the Justin D. Edwards Prize for Best Edited Collection 2026

• Nick Groom and William Hughes, eds., The Vampire: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2025)
• Andrew Smith, ed., The Victorian Ghost Story: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press, 2025)
• Robert Edgar, Lauren Stephenson and John Marland, eds., Horrifying Children: Hauntology and the Legacy of Children’s Television (Bloomsbury, 2024)
• John Whatley, ed., The Gothic in Times of Crisis (Manchester University Press, 2025)
• Carol Margaret Davison, ed., Gothic Dreams and Nightmares (Manchester University Press, 2024)
• Barbara Chamberlin, Julia Round, and Kom Kunyosying, eds., Horror and Comics (University of Wales Press, 2025)
• Sam George and Bill Hughes, eds., The Legacy of John Polidori: The Romantic Vampire and its Progeny (Manchester University Press, 2024)
• Ruth Heholt and Jo Parsons, eds., Ghosts and the Gothic (Manchester University Press, 2025)

All nominations will be assessed by a panel of past winners and presidents of the IGA. The Chair for the prize panels is Joseph Crawford. The Secretary for the prize is Alexia Ainsworth. A shortlist will be published on the IGA website by the middle of July. The prizes will be presented (or, if a winning author is not present, announced) during the conference which, this year, is hosted at the University of Hull, July 28-31 2026.

Congratulations to all nominees!

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.

We are pleased to share that applications for the role of Secretary to The Allan Lloyd Smith and Justin D. Edwards Memorial Book Prizes has been extended to January 19, 2026.

We can also confirm that the successful applicant will receive a fee of £300.

If you are interested in applying, please send a copy of your CV and a short statement of support to Joseph Crawford at J.Crawford@exeter.ac.uk, CC-ing the International Gothic Association (members@globalgoth.org).

Dear IGA friends,

Sara Wasson here! With enormous love and warmth, I’m posting that this year I need to step aside from being Chair of the IGA Memorial Book Prize Committees in order to pursue some–exciting but very time-consuming!–research commitments this coming spring/summer. The Co-Presidents have kindly suggested a temporary pause, so I hope to return in the 2027-28 round. It was a real honour to chair the prizes in 2024, and I’m wishing absolutely all the best to the incoming Chair, and will be cheering for them when they are announced.

I want to again honour and mention the hard work of the panellists, and indeed the Chair–not just myself but also all those who have gone before: David Punter, Dale Townshend, absolute greats! I also want to honour all the panellists, an extraordinary task–for people on two committees (including the Chair), last time they were reading 30 books, and it meant essentially generously giving up their summer in order to read and celebrate the work of this beautiful community. The panellists are heroes and to be cherished, and I loved working with you all! I hope to work with you in research and writing collaborations in the future.

I was privileged to win the Allan Lloyd Smith Prize twice, and these were two of the most precious and joyful experiences in my whole career. The IGA is not just a scholarly community–it’s a supportive, creative, and warm community. The IGA is an incredibly special organisation. It meant a great deal to have a chance to take the Prize forward.

I am sad to step aside this year but it is for positive reasons, namely research commitments that mean that I would not be able to give the prize the colossal attention it rightly requires.

Update about the Book Prizes Secretary Role

In other good news, the kind Co-Presidents are generously assessing whether some nominal payment may accrue to the Book Secretary role supporting the Chair. I support this wholeheartedly. To facilitate these good plans, the timeline for the secretary hire is being adjusted, and specifics on honorary nominal remuneration and a new deadline will be announced early next year. Applicants who have already sent in CVs can rest assured that their applications have been safely received and will be considered.

Monica, Xavi, Matt, Emily, Bronte, and every panellist, it’s been a pleasure to work with you on the Prizes. The IGA is in great hands! Go bats!

Warmly,

Sara Wasson