The 2025 Otherwise Awards were announced on March 24, 2026. Recommendations are open for this year's Otherwise Award.

Award Information

Conference Information

  • Award Year: 2025
  • Award Year Number: Year 35

Award Winner

The 2025 jury chose 1 work for the Otherwise Award.

Luminous by Silvia Park (Simon & Schuster, 2025)

Work Information

Title: LuminousAuthor:
Publisher:
Publisher Name: Simon & SchusterYear: 2025
Work Type: Novel

Award Honor List

The 2025 jury chose 5 works for the Honor List

What a Fish Looks Like, (Stelliform Press, 2025)

A delightfully metafictional book of (recast) fairytales set in a deteriorating landscape punctuated by impending doom. Through humor and kaleidoscopic storytelling, Beker explores gender, identity, and human relationships with boldness, modernity, illustrations, and playful prose poetry vignettes that deftly portray a community in the midst of transformation.

A Song for You and I, (Random House Graphic, 2025)

A sweetly charming and perfect graphic novel for young adult readers that engages with difference by skilfully handling themes of self-discovery, gender exploration, and trans identity without being sentimental or patronising. The main character’s journey provides resonant feedback on agency, community, surrender, and self-acceptance as one evolves and becomes one’s true self.

A fascinating body of work whose sum is a poetic statement on gender. It poignantly explores women in science across eras, restoring lost voices and creating new spaces, ultimately snatching a place for innovative thinkers erased across history by gender biases. A clever and compelling conversation that expresses a diverse array of women’s voices and identities, and asserts their right to be celebrated.

A unique and ambitious text that imagines another society’s relationship with gender, and explores how trans identity expresses itself in contexts both very similar to and very far from our own—creating a natural, complex, and holistic look at trans selfhood and community. This first-person journey casts a textured look at family-hood and love in a subtle speculative context to create a work that’s more compelling and relevant than ever in today’s polarised world.

A different kind of verse novel in an alluring first-person reflection of the inherent fraught experience of living in a society that inhibits free gender expression. The bold text offers an engaging resistance in its experimental array in form and structure, resonating against historical and mythological concepts of gender to build something new.

Award Long List

About this Long List, the jury wrote: “We were enamored by the excellence of these works for their inventive exploration of storytelling, identity, belonging, sentience, genre, and gender with singular or shifting perspectives, in daring and vivid ways that stand them apart.”

The 2025 jury chose 7 works for the Long List

Jurors

  • Eugen Bacon (chair)
  • Andrew Hook
  • Cheryl S. Ntumy
  • K. Ibura
  • Rebecca Fraimow