ELO is excited to announce the winners of the 2025 Electronic Literature Awards.  These awards were coordinated by. Alinta Krauth and Jason Nelson.  ELO gives 4 juried awards that come with a cash prize and the esteem of the international e-lit community.

The Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award

Judges:  Stephanie Strickland,  Lai-Tze Fan,  Maria Engberg
Winner:  Bertrand Gervais

Bertrand Gervais is a Professor in the Literary Studies Department at the University of Québec in Montréal (UQAM). He is the Director of Figura, the Research Center on Textuality and the Imaginary, and of NT2, the Research Laboratory on Hypermedia Art and Literature. From 2015 to 2024 he served as the Canada Research Chair in Digital Arts and Literatures. During his career he participated in and supported The CELL Project for the Electronic Literature Organization. He also organized a brilliant ELO conference in Montreal.

Bertrand’s career, spanning more than 40 years of contributions to scholarship in digital artforms, has been foundational in the field of digital literary arts, semiotics of the web, and digital aesthetics. As cofounder of the NT2 laboratory, Bertrand not only established key research and documentation methodologies but cemented the bridge between Francophone research in the field and world-wide initiatives. Under his direction, the partnership Littérature Québécoise Mobile revolutionized the Web presence of the literary community of Francophone Canada for the benefit of creators and the linguistic minority publishing industry.

Bertand’s contributions and efforts toward international, interuniversity, and interdisciplinary collaboration have proved essential for several generations of researchers, artists, and digital creators. As co-founder of the 1P1 Laboratory, which specializes in extended realities, Bertrand’s work continues to have an impact on current and future research, revolutionizing the spheres of scientific engagement with the arts, technologies, and research-design.

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The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature

Judges: Dene Grigar, Mariusz Pisarski,  Monique Tschofen

Winner:
The Culture of Neural Networks: Synthetic Literature and Art in (not only) the Czech and Slovak Context, by Karel  Piorecký and Zuzana Husárová

A fascinating and timely perspective on art, neural networks, and AI, offered by scholars from regions where the ideas of the Golem, the robot, and alchemical enhancement of the human spirit have long been created, practiced, and discussed—even around family dinner tables. This Czech and Slovak lineage lends the work a unique historical and philosophical angle. Piorecký and Husárová  temper the current wave of enthusiasm and uncritical faith in AI in a productive manner, offering a balanced view on creativity and AI. The body of knowledge and artistic practice that serves as context breathes fresh air into the global conversation on synthetic creativity. By highlighting voices and examples from continental and Central European art and science, the authors enrich the field of electronic literature, introducing underexplored contexts, names, and traditions that should benefit researchers and creators worldwide.

Runner Up
The New Legibility, by Theo Ellin Ballew

Beautifully designed, this highly witty, playful and meta-referential essay manages to both show and tell; an example of how interactive forms of scholarship can do things that printed pages cannot. With an interface that effectively uses hypertextual links, crossouts, and bubbles, Ballew deeply theorizes what legibility means in the context of the history of elite, disability, design, and the materiality of reading. This playful and insightful academic essay on the nature of text on the screen pays homage to the vernacular web of old and cult classics such as Grammatron. The meta-commentary is ironic and provocative, defining and enacting “static” text as “less legible,” while rendering mobile text as an expression of stability. As readers digest these turns of phrase and meaning, the text invites them to doodle on the screen, leaving their own mark on the background of micro-lexias before proceeding to the next chunk of argumentation. User-friendly, with a backlink mechanism for visited lexias and a reset button, this small hypertext evokes alternative expressions of academic discourse.

Honorable Mention
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort’s Output: Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953-2023

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort’s Output: Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953-2023 is an excellent resource and a milestone of scholarly research. Organized into 17 thematic sections, from conversations to literary forms to Tweets, along with detailed back matter (e.g., glossary, timeline), the book covers much ground necessary for understanding 200 different explorations with English-language “outputs” over the last 70 years. It is a monumental reference for students and scholars alike.

The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature

Judges:  Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang,  Florence Walker, Lyle Skains

WINNER: Espejo de Carne, by benjamin escalonilla godayol

The judges found Espejo de Carne delightfully visceral and weird, full of flavour and thoughtfulness. The narrative resonates intensely, and the music is used in a multiplicative effect to both heighten the text and encourage the reader to linger on particular passages. On its own, the text is compelling, well-written, a science-fiction-oriented dive into the reader/player’s “birth” as a cloned human, experiencing the rawness and newness of life, the universe, and everything. The presentation is curated, technically flawless, easing the reader/player into the interactivity even as they become engrossed in this story of themselves as duplicate, guided by interactions with their OG human. Techies may find the “electronic” in this work of electronic literature slow to develop, but we found the confluence of a strong narrative, an original voice, the seeding and layering of multiple modes and carefully considered interactivity to work beautifully to convey a story that manages to put the reader/player deeply, immersively into a character’s life without resorting to overt gameplay or gimmicks. Espejo de Carne‘s subtle use of choice, linkage, and multimedia place the reader/player firmly within an interesting and enjoyable interactive narrative.

RUNNER UP:

Happenings: A tragic-lyrical philosophical essay, by Monique Tschofen

This work is well-conceived, brilliantly executed, and quietly devastating, leaving the judges with a tangible heaviness, a precision-targeted burst of emotion. In a world that is all-too-often dismissive of sexual assault, Happenings constitutes a thoughtful and striking intervention. The judges were especially impressed by its commitment to keeping the reader/player uneasy – an impulse that never tipped over into gratuitous misery. Artistically, the work uses LLMs well, though such tools bring with them their own implications within a work positioned as a feminist text.  The use of Scalar for creative purposes is also to be commended, as the platform has primarily been deployed for pathways through scholarship; in this context it is an extremely apt foundation for a philosophical essay. Overall, the work is well-constructed and artfully conveyed.

Honourable Mention

BabyHex, by David Ciccoricco, Mez Breeze, and Marina Cone

BabyHex plays with the creative anthropomorphisation of gen-AI/LLMs using gen-AI, while simultaneously playing with the reader through the illusion of agency. The interface is polished and effective, conveying the contrary and possibly cursed nature of these interactions in a highly meaningful way.

Honourable Mention

Hunting and Gathering in Cyberspace, by Judy Malloy

The lyrical nature of “narrabase” fiction is on full display in this work, scrambling together the short lyrical pieces of text into an ever-shifting poetic narrative. There is also a nostalgic effect, a clunky inconvenience to the hyperlinked elements that reflects the experience of the nascent World Wide Web of the time. A work worth exploring, then and now.

The Maverick Award

Judge:  Rob Wittig and Christine Wilks

Winner: Jason Nelson

Jason Nelson is a prolific, bright, mischievous, and thought-provoking creator. The contact button on many of his interactive online works reveals two statements that capture the spirit of his decades of work.

“I make odd games / artworks / digital poems

You hate / love / are confused by what I make”

The confusion Jason’s work sparks is a generous, friendly confusion, hilarious and serious at the same time. Throughout decades of award winning work — work appearing on screens, in quirky physical objects, and stunning visuals projected onto huge architectural spaces — Jason has accurately assessed the norms and expectations of current digital culture. Then he has set about systematically breaking those norms and frustrating those expectations. The result is insight. And laughter. Jason’s work always shows you something you hadn’t witnessed before in digital culture, and inside yourself.

One of Jason’s superpowers is actually to see interfaces and platforms. These frameworks, once introduced, quickly become invisible. Their creators often wish them and design them to become invisible in order to hide the degree to which they extract our money and attention. Jason makes mischief with frameworks. His scribbly marks and simplified forms call into question slick, orderly, high-design. His games don’t follow the rules. He makes familiar keystrokes do unfamiliar things, and users rediscover the joy of curious clicking. The topics of the work are important, dealing with how humans relate to themselves, each other, and the earth.

He is a wonderful line-by-line writer. Just to quote a few project titles:

“Birds Still Warm from Flying,”
“Holiday Disaster Generator,”
“alarmingly these are not lovesick zombies,”
and “With Love from a Failed Planet.”

1. Jason’s upbringing amid the farms and ranches of Oklahoma reminds us of the roots of the term maverick, which in the American west meant an unbranded calf, cow, or steer who wanders away from the herd. Jason Nelson’s innovative wanderings are a great gift, and he richly deserves this award.

(from coordinators Jason Nelson and Alinta Krauth)

The Marjorie C. Luesebrink Career Achievement Award:

The Robert Coover Award for a work of Electronic Literature:

The Maverick Award:

The N Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature:

The ELO is proud to announce the recipient of a brand new prize: The Maverick Award.  This first ever award goes to Talan Memmott.

The Maverick is awarded  to an independent spirit: a writer, artist, researcher, programmer, designer, performer, or hybrid creator who does not adhere to a conventional path but creates their own and in so doing makes a singular contribution to the field of electronic literature.

As founder of an alternative learning institution, creator of one of the first online journals of e-lit, author of celebrated works of e-lit, scholar of digital media, and an artist who challenged every medium he worked in, Memmott is a singular figure in the world of electronic literature.

Throughout his career, Talan Memmott has blazed a path in digital literature.   He is the author of over 40 electronic literary works, and the novel My Molly De parted (Free Dogma Press). His works, perhaps epitomized by Lexia to Perplexia, have been the subject of acclaim and extensive critical analysis.

Memmott is also the Founder and President of UnderAcademy College, an unaccredited undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate anti-degree institution.  UnderAcademy College situates itself as a shadow-academic environment offering alternative courses and anti-degree programs in a variety of subjects. This alternative site of education has offered one-of-a-kind courses, such as How to Read and Write Fake News: Journullism in the Age of Trump, which Memmott co-taught.

Memmott holds an MFA in Literary Arts/Electronic Writing from Brown University and a PhD in Interaction Design/Digital Rhetoric and Poetics from Malmö University.

Memmott has taught and been a researcher in digital art, digital design, electronic writing, new media studies, and digital culture at University of California Santa Cruz; University of Bergen; Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, Sweden; California State University Monterey Bay; the Georgia Institute of Technology; University of Colorado Boulder; and the Rhode Island School of Design. He is currently Associate Professor of Creative Digital Media at Winona State University.

He has collaborated on many digital projects, including netprovs, such as, “I Work or the Web,” and the 2018 Congress of Fakes at ELO in Montreal.  He has served up computationally generated gastropoetic marvels with Scott Rettberg as part of ELO Cork and ELOrlando.

Memmott has  also given extensive service to ELO, having held a position on the Board, including Vice President.  He was a co-editor for the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2 (ELO). He was also a co-editor of the ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature.

During the award ceremony ELO Vice President Caitlin Fisher offered an origin story for the award: The idea came up at the wake for Damon Loren Baker for an award recognizing, the artists and scholars, like Damon, “amazing people, as part of the ELO Community, who are not likely to win the other awards because they are on a crazy, brilliant, genius path all their own.”

In the future, the Maverick Award is to be nominated and elected by the Literary Advisory Board. The award: $500 and a bottle of St. Germain.  Rettberg explained that the new award would go to someone “who took an unconventional path and who really colored outside of the lines, and of course, Damon is part of this prize, which is a bottle of Saint Germain, Damon’s favorite liqueur.”