The winners of the 2018 Lord Ruthven Assembly awards, presented for the best fiction on vampires and the best academic work on the study of the vampire figure in culture and literature, were announced at this year’s International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts.

The current officers of the Lord Ruthven Assembly are: Amanda Firestone, Ph.D., (President); longtime vampire writer Margaret Carter (VP) and Carol McMullen-Pettit (Secretary/treasurer).

This year the members voted for:

Lord Ruthven Award: Fiction

• Charlaine Harris: The Complete Sookie Stackhouse Stories

Lord Ruthven Award: Non-Fiction

• Gary A. Smith: Vampire Films of the 1970s

Lord Ruthven Award: Media/Popular Culture

• Midnight, Texas Season 1

Special Recognition

• Powers of Darkness: The Lost Translation of Dracula for both the “translation” from Stoker’s text and the scholarship added by Hans de Roos.

The awards take their name from the vampire antagonist in John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819) and are given by the Lord Ruthven Assembly, an organization affiliated with the IAFA whose objectives include the serious pursuit of scholarship and research focusing on the vampire/revenant figure in a variety of disciplines. The Lord Ruthven Assembly as a public group on Facebook.