Results of the 2026 Lindenbaum competition

Image by Pat ONeill

I am pleased to announce that the winner of the 2026 Lindenbaum Prize for short gamebook fiction is You are Dog by Iain Murray.

Merit awards go to Elie Merle with Tower of Dreams and Jason Romein with Logevity.

Commendation awards go to Andrew Wright with Quest for the Green Grimoire, Vilian Stefanov with Violence is my Last Option, Paul Partington with The Northern Marches and Matthew MacDonald with Treachery at Aeon's Keep. This is due to a tie between three books.

You can find the books here: Lloyd of Gamebooks: Voting is now open for the 2026 Lindenbaum competition!

I would like to thank everybody who participated, the authors and those dedicated readers who took the time to evaluate all the entries, and also a further thanks to those readers who provided feedback and comment to the authors.

If you wish to provide any (more) feedback to the authors, please email me at lindenbaumprize@gmail.com. You may do this even if you didn't vote.

If you intend to write feedback in a public place, please email me the address and I will link to it.

It is no small thing as entrants to write original gamebooks. To write a gamebook (even one that must be limited to 100 sections) requires considerable time and creative effort. It is the type of writing project that can take months to accomplish and I appreciate greatly the work done by all the authors who entered this year's competition.

I would like to thank the entrants for such an excellent competition with a wide variety of gamebook genres and styles (although I have to mention the improbability of two entries about being a dog!).

I would like to thank the judges for their time and excellent input as always.

I would also like to extend thanks to Peter Agapov who sponsored the competition, Tammy Badowski who donated her time and talent to the competition and Crumbly Head Games who has donated free subscriptions to GBAT for the top 3 entrants.