Announcing the Winner of the 2025 Manly Wade Wellman Award
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Posted on 2025-07-12 at 16:00 by admin
Saturday, July 12, 2025, Durham, NC: The North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation is proud to announce the winner of the 2025 Manly Wade Wellman Award for North Carolina Science Fiction and Fantasy, the result of juried selection from the list of 12 finalists.
The Award was presented at ConGregate 11 on Friday, July 11, 2025 in Winston-Salem, NC, to author Nathan Ballingrud for The Crypt of the Moon Spider, published by Tor Nightfire:
Ballingrud’s acceptance remarks read:
I’m thrilled and honored to accept the Manly Wade Wellman award this year. I’ve been a fan of Wellman’s fiction for decades now, so this is especially gratifying to me. North Carolina has been my home for over half my life, and the South for nearly all of it. We grow our own special strain of the weird and the fantastic down here, and I’m delighted to stand beside my fellow nominees, as well as the many, many other North Carolina writers, in nurturing that strain and carrying it forward — or backward, or sideways, or into other dimensions. After all, we’re just the custodians. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for acknowledging my story.
The Manly Wade Wellman Award was founded in 2013 to recognize outstanding achievement in science fiction and fantasy novels written by North Carolina authors. The 2025 award covers novels published in 2024 and marks the 12th presentation of the award.
The award is named for long-time North Carolina author Manly Wade Wellman with the permission of his estate.