Check Out These Recent SFF Awards and Honors
At the 57th NAACP Image Awards in February, Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author won the Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work: Fiction, and Angie Thomas’s Nic Blake and the Remarkables: The Book of Anansi won the Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work: Youth/Teens.
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And speaking of Nnedi Okorafor, she was just announced as a Guest of Honor at the Locus awards on May 30, 2026, along with Tananarive Due and Stephen Graham Jones.
And the 2025 Aurealis Award winners were also announced. They are given for the best Australian speculative fiction, and included Upon a Starlit Tide by Kell Woods and Cinder House by Freya Marske.
A New Novel from Micaiah Johnson is on the Way!
We are big fans of The Space Between Worlds and Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson here at Book Riot, so the news of an upcoming novel is very exciting! This one is horror, but I am so excited that I had to mention it. It’s called The Unhaunting and is about a house where nothing bad can happen, and where all the negative energy that is deflected ends up.
From the publisher’s description: “At the end of the Civil War, a daughter of the confederacy made what she thought was an innocent wish: to build a house where nothing bad could happen. But peace came at a price, and one hundred and seventy years later Shantell and her friends are about to discover where all that darkness ended up.
When Shantell’s best friend, Avery, tells her he has inherited a house big enough to make their dreams of a sanctuary come true, she’s too cautious to be optimistic. A lifetime of loss—her father to the Iraq war, her brother to police violence, and her mother to suicide—has taught her cynicism, and even though Avery swears the house has never experienced a tragedy, she goes along expecting everything from black mold to evil spirits.”
You can read more about it on Reactor. The Unhaunting is out October 13, 2026, from G.P. Putnam’s Sons, and while you’re waiting, pick up The Space Between Worlds and Those Beyond the Wall!
Read an Excerpt from Building 903 by Lois Lowry
Lois Lowry is the author of more than 50 books, including The Giver and Number the Stars. Now, at 89, she has a new novel coming out in the fall! It’s called Building 903, and it’s a middle grade dystopian novel about censorship and book banning.
From the publisher description: “Twins Tessa and Theo live in a world ruled by the tyrannical Koziris, where there are no dangers or rebels… or so they’ve been told. In this world, citizens live long lives, and while many hate Koziris, they are comfortable and safe. So, when Tessa’s brother disappears, nobody wants to discuss it. But then Miriam, their 135-year-old neighbor bound for the retirement community, slips Tessa a key—not only to her brother’s disappearance, but to the source of all real magic . . . books.
As Tessa and her parents begin their search for Theo, Tessa learns that books not only tell us stories—they open portals and unlock our humanity through our most powerful tool: the imagination. Once that truth has been revealed, Tessa won’t be able to rest until she has retrieved her twin and society itself has been transformed.”
You can read an excerpt at People, as well as check out the new deluxe edition of The Giver. Building 903 and the new The Giver edition will be out on September 29, 2026 from Clarion Books.
Okay, star bits, now take the knowledge you have learned here today and use it for good, not evil. If you want to know more about books, I talk about books pretty much nonstop (when I’m not reading them), and you can hear me say lots of adjectives about them on the BR podcast All the Books! and on Bluesky and Instagram.
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