Living Canon

Nebula Awards 2025: Complete list of winners

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association has announced the winners of the 2025 Nebula Awards, celebrating the year’s most imaginative and expertly crafted speculative fiction across multiple categories. Daryl Gregory’s When We Were Real claimed the top prize for Best Novel, a work published by Saga that explores what it means to inhabit consciousness in unprecedented ways. The full slate of winners showcases the remarkable breadth of contemporary science fiction and fantasy—from the sweeping ambitions of novel-length narratives to the precisely calibrated emotional impact of short fiction. Across novelettes, novellas, short stories, and young adult fiction, this year’s honorees demonstrate why the Nebula Awards remain one of the field’s most prestigious recognitions, voted on by the membership of the SFWA itself.

Among the shorter fiction categories, “Our Echoes Drifting Through the Marsh” by Marie Croke earned the Novelette award for its appearance in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, while Renan Bernardo’s Disgraced Return of the Kap’s Needle from Dark Matter INK secured the Novella honor. P.A. Cornell’s “Through the Machine” took the Best Short Story award via Lightspeed, and David Anaxagoras’s The Tower (published by Recorded Books) won in the Young Adult category. Each of these works reflects both the technical mastery and imaginative reach that the Nebula Awards have long championed.

Below, find the complete breakdown of the 2025 Nebula Awards winners:

Best Novel

Best Novelette

  • Our Echoes Drifting Through the Marsh”, by Marie Croke (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 1/9/25)

Best Novella

Best Short Story

  • Through the Machine”, by P.A. Cornell (Lightspeed 5/25)

Best Young Adult