Hugo Awards 2026: Winners

Back in April when the finalists for the 2026 Hugo Awards were announced, your Frumious Consorters talked about what we liked in the nominations, what we were excited to find out more about, and what we hoped to actually read. Curious to discover how things turned out and what the Consortium thought? Read on!

Doug: The awards were awarded! A quick list of winners is here and the detailed report on votes and nominations is here. Who wants to kick off our round table of mixed metaphors?

Doreen: First off, thanks for the link to the report, that I absolutely pored over as I do every year! Just as interesting to me as knowing who won is knowing how the rest of the voting shook out. There were some surprises, especially in the categories Doug and I both managed to cover at TFC, but I think I’d like to talk about some of the non-surprises first. Such as A Wizard Of Earthsea‘s win in the Graphic Story category. I didn’t rate it highly myself, but I am completely unsurprised that more people were in agreeance with Doug and propelled it to the win. Also, apologies if I take a while to reply, I have been feeling rather poorly this last day or so and it has been vexing!

Emily: I read an email from Book Riot recently that described the Hugo as “Voted on by members, they fall somewhere between a typical literary award and a Goodreads Choice award: a popularity contest with a caveat.”

Personally, I’ve always considered the Hugo as a major professional award in SFF. Since you are both voters, how do you think of it?

Doreen: I read that article too! And, y’know, before Doug persuaded me to become a voter, I too thought it was a mystical enclave of wise elders who pronounced judgment over the best offerings of the field. What could I, a mere mortal, bring to this convocation besides my often ornery opinion? It was actually a pleasant surprise to discover that the Hugos are more a snippy democracy with winners chosen by enthusiasts who genuinely care about reading good fiction (and related.) The membership fee is a barrier to entry but, I think, a good one because it keeps out both the unserious and genuine bad actors, while not restricting voting to a select panel like the major mainstream literary prizes do. So, while the Hugos still have the vox populi of anyone who wants to pay USD50 (was it, this year?) for the privilege of reading and voting, it’s more selective than the free Goodreads voting because Hugo voters are committed to showcasing what writing in these fields specifically really impacted us in the past year. Tl;dr: Hugo voters are passionate sff readers with generally good taste, rendering any rewards bestowed quite meaningful.

That said, there are sometimes years that you go “whaaaat?” but I think Jo Walton wrote a whole book about that that Doug reviewed?

Emily: Those are great points! Membership does seem like a significant caveat, and the Hugo voters I know (a sample size of maybe 7?) all take it seriously.

Doreen: It helps, too, that nominations also come from us instead of, say, sales reports. I regularly nominate things that no one else has read or seems to care about, so I was genuinely shocked when The Tainted Cup not only made the ballot but won last year. A bit sad that A Drop Of Corruption didn’t do the same but I have yet to read all the other nominees. That said, I do recommend Shroud if you’re ready to be immersed in a nightmare.

Doug: Doreen, I’m glad you enjoyed the report! Any particular surprises? Our chat when the finalists were announced noted that in Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) “the top choice got 313 nominations out of 650 ballots cast” and it was in fact Sinners, which went on to win. Deservedly so, in my view, though it was a very competitive category this year.

The win for A Wizard of Earthsea is, I think, Le Guin’s fourth posthumous Hugo. I’m sure that’s a record, and I’m also very glad that she won some when she was alive. When her name comes up with awards, I always think of the obnoxious interviewer who asked her in the ’70s whether she would rather win the Hugo or the National Book Award. Whereupon she answered, “The Nobel of course.” When the interviewer replied that they didn’t give the Nobel to people who wrote fantasy (no longer true, and anyway Henryk Sienkiewicz in 1905), she said “Well maybe I can do something for peace, then.”

Doreen, the Hugos need your ornery opinions! And a couple thousand others.

I do think the Hugos are the top award in SFF. Don’t ask me to say just why, but I feel like the Nebulas (voted on by SFWA members) were neck and neck with the Hugos in the SFF that I grew up with but then receded in the ’90s and early ’00s. There’s bunches of other awards, some more vox pop, lots of special-interest subgenre, some UK-oriented, plenty in languages that aren’t English, but the Hugos are the big ones. I think it’s a combination of longevity, combination of fans and pros (and of course the huge overlap of pros who were fans first), and a tested community that cares about the Hugos.

It’s been about ten years since the Hugos fended off a major attack in the form of the “puppy” slates. Their approach to dominating the nominations, and thus locking up the finalists, was technically within the rules, but very much not in the spirit of the Hugo award. The community responded with a massive spike in voting turnout in the second round, and giving no award in several categories. The community also organized some of the specialist knowledge within fandom about optimal voting systems and put in technical changes that dilute the advantages of slate voting. There were several possible failure modes in this crisis, but I am pleased to say that the Hugos, in my view, passed the test.

In 2023, another attack came, this time from within. People deeply involved in the process took it upon themselves to disqualify works and people that the nominators had given enough support to become finalists. There were also enough statistical anomalies in the voting to call some results into question. Unfortunately, there was no way to undo the damage done that year, although one of the key culprits was this year banned for life from participating in Worldcon and some others were handed multi-year bans.

There are probably more failure modes that the Hugos could explore, though I hope they won’t. In a world in which a hedge-fund guy basically bought a slot in a pro tennis tournament for $10 million, a malign actor with a lot of resources could do considerable harm. A Hugo would probably come much cheaper than $10 million.

The larger point, though, is that people care about the Hugos, at the level of making conscientious choices in both voting and nominating, and at the level of volunteering to make sure the process is well run, and at the level of thinking about how to improve the award experience. This year, LA had a professional announcer read finalists’ names and pre-recorded that part of each category’s presentation. I don’t know off-hand whether that had been done before, but it seems like a best practice to me, and I hope it continues.

As the Hugos become more important to the wider world of books and reading — as well as visual media and gaming to a lesser extent; nowadays there are plenty of moviemakers and game builders who grew up admiring Hugo-winning works and would thrilled for their work to join their ranks — I hope the sometimes insular Worldcon fans and organizers will look more often to the wider world. SFF is a big deal! Share the joy! And recognize that we are playing on a bigger stage. Personally, I would like to see the Hugos proactively get the resources needed for independent auditing, and I would like to see them explore having voting software that produces audit trails for ballots. I think those would have prevented at least some of the funny business in 2023, and I hope that organizers will take a look before someone someday has to say “Gosh, preparing for an audit would really have prevented that fiasco.”

Oh! One last bit of neepery before I try to concentrate on the works more than the process. The readers’ packet — works, excerpts and selections that artists and their publishers choose to make available to Hugo voters so that their votes will be more informed — has been a huge benefit. In insidery categories such as Best Editor, I know that my ability to judge is extremely limited, but I take the position that finalists will put together a packet that they think is sufficient for a voter to make an informed decision. For categories such as Best Artist where it is a matter of finding their work, I take the packet to be a representative sample. For some of the big fiction categories, there’s no substitute for having the whole work at hand to read, and I am grateful each time that I vote that the finalists’ generosity means that I am voting on this particular work, not reputation, not hearsay, not my feelings about the creator’s work in general.

The Jo Walton book that Doreen mentioned above is chatty, clear and good, with a special treat in the form of comments to the original blog pieces from people who are themselves deeply knowledgeable and occasionally luminaries in the field. The now-late Gardner Dozois, for example. One drawback that is getting larger with time is that the history stops with the year 2000. Walton has good reasons to stop there. First, it’s around the time that she herself started getting nominated for Hugo (and not-a-Hugo) awards, and she did not want to write about years that she might have been in the running. Second, when the columns originally appeared online in 2010–11, she did not think that enough time had elapsed to offer a historical perspective. As she writes, “If you’re considering whether a book from 1958 or 1978 has lasted, knowing it’s in print in 2010 is useful. This doesn’t work so well for a book from 1998, never mind 2008.” Now, though, there is a quarter century of Hugo history that isn’t covered.

Doreen, what were some of the surprises you spotted on the detailed voting report?

Doreen: I mean, it’s always a surprise when something I put pretty low on my slate wins the whole category, especially if it’s not an author who I know already has plenty of support and name recognition. Like, I’m not the biggest fan of Amal El-Mohtar‘s work, but I’m not surprised that she won Best Novella either: she’s very popular and that’s fine. I was surprised that Isabel J Kim’s phenomenal Wire Mother came in second to a short story that Doug and I were both lukewarm over and didn’t rate highly on our slates at all. Which isn’t to say that it was a bad story! I was just surprised that it won, and by quite a large margin too. In fairness, I don’t completely understand how the run-off system works, so feel free to enlighten me as to whether I’m mistaken as to the gap between the two.

But I also found Thomas Ha’s win (with a short story that reminded me of anti-authoritarian work others had done earlier and better in the 20th century) more surprising when coupled with H H Pak’s win for Never Eaten Vegetables, a novelette that struck me as a reboot of 20th century classic “The Cold Equations,” now starring a convenient AI plot device. Were voters getting so nostalgic for the themes of the past that such re-visitations merited award?

Relatedly, I wondered whether I was the only person whose opinions on AI had perhaps too quickly soured in the year or so since NEV and the novella runner-up Automatic Noodle were published. Nowadays, it feels like the idea of equating AI capabilities with personhood seems not only increasingly unlikely but downright insulting in a climate where generative AI is more likely to induce psychosis and self-harm than actually improve our lives. It’s weird to me to have stories focus on theoretical harms to theoretical entities instead of to actual vulnerable demographics. That said, “Wire Mother” — which does deal with the effect of technology on human beings — came out at roughly the same time, so it’s not like I can’t expect stories that hew closer to the current zeitgeist. Idk, I guess I expect Hugo voters to be more attuned to current events than most other fiction readers, particularly when it comes to technological advances permeating the mainstream. I felt a lot of “these stories were probably killer in 2025 but not so much in 2026.”

Going back to an earlier thing you mentioned, I did elide the fact that many Hugo voters, while fans, are also industry professionals! Which absolutely lends the awards greater credibility, as any tendency towards insider bias is tempered by the participation of enthusiastic amateurs. One thing I did notice with the packet and voting this year is that nominees who didn’t submit their works for evaluation were often bottom of the ballot. That’s an especial shame for Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shroud, which was pretty damn special. Ofc, I can’t really compare it to the rest of the novel slate because I’ve only read A Drop Of Corruption but I’ll hopefully find time for more soon! (And to reiterate for anyone new to TFC, no, I don’t vote for/on material I haven’t read or experienced yet.)

Finally before I go to bed, I really appreciate your insight into the behind-the-scenes processes, Doug! I found the Chengdu year both baffling and disappointing, and while I do love it when the Hugos travel to countries where English isn’t the primary language, it would be really neat if WorldCon could figure out a way to smooth out things like financing issues. Ofc, that is likely easier said than done.

Emily: When work that seems retro wins, I wonder if it is because of that kind of nostalgia you mention, or if it has been long enough that it seems new to a bunch of voters. Like when a young pop start covers a song old enough that most of the pop star’s fan base didn’t know the original.

(I don’t know the average age of Hugo voters; it’s just something I sometimes wonder about in other settings.)

To follow up on your remarks about AI, it’s one of the things I’m annoyed about with LLMs being called “AI.” Some of my favorite speculative fiction has AI characters that predate this moment (like Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch books).

Doug: Following up on some things Emily said, I don’t think there’s any way to find out the average age of Hugo voters, but I had a similar thought about generational change among the finalists and winners. There’s not a sharp break, just because the demographics are not as pronounced as when the Baby Boom wave swept in. Pak’s (undated) web site says that they are “a medical student by daylight and a writer by moonlight.” They were in their second year of eligibility for the Astounding Award, so that’s a first sale in 2024. All in all, I’d says they are in their late 20s, early 30s at the very latest. The first publication of short fiction that Thomas Ha lists on his web site is in 2020, so I’d expect that he is also in his late 20s or, more likely in my view, early 30s. Tempus fugit and all that, and maybe there are more younger voters. Of course Suzanne Collins is over 60 and still a YA finalist, so it’s not an infallible connection.

Doreen mentioned how much she liked it when Worldcon travels to countries where English is not the primary language. Next year is Montreal, and the year after that is Brisbane, so I guess it kinda depends on how you feel about Australian. The year after next has not been awarded, but it is very, very likely to be Dublin. So again there’s English as the primary language, but it’s its own particular variant and literary heritage. Edmonton seems to be clearing the field for 2030, so the Hugos will be back in North America, but again in Canada. That would be four consecutive Worldcons outside of the US, which has never happened before. There have been three previous pairs of consecutive non-US Worldcons: 1994 (Winnipeg) and 1995 (Glasgow); 2009 (Montreal) and 2010 (Melbourne); and 2019 (Dublin) and 2020 (Wellington, NZ). That last had in-person attendance derailed by the pandemic. Worldcon in Middle Earth! A dream deferred.

Moving the convention around is definitely a way to put more “world” into Worldcon, which is one of the few areas where that is happening. Worldcon seems content to remain a medium-sized convention with a big name, a long history, and an award that’s basically the only one noticed outside the genre.

Turning to the categories, I finally figured out what annoys me so much about the semiprozines listing dozens of people as finalists, and it’s that if all the other categories did the same — and if all of a semiprozine’s first readers are crucial to its success, you better believe a novel’s publicity team is in many cases even more important for people to know that the book exists — the Hugo award would become utterly unwieldy. They are claiming a special status that essentially nobody else can claim, and that strikes me as unfair. So I didn’t vote in that category.

I was super pleased to see that Sinners won. I was very happy about A Wizard of Earthsea — the source material caught me at the right time of life, so I have fond memories and this version really is gorgeous. I would have been even happier if there had somehow been a tie for first with The Space Cat, because man, that was just so much fun! And heartfelt in a good way. I was also very happy about Inventing the Renaissance, because history is the secret sauce of so much SFF and also because, as Palmer said, she used so many SFF tools in writing her history.

“Hex Supply Customer Support Log” was not my first choice in Best Poem, but it was my second (and Doreen’s third), so I’m content with that choice by the Hugo voters. I’m also glad that LA made Best Poem their bonus Hugo — each Worldcon can choose to award a Hugo in a non-standard category it designates — and followed Seattle doing the same so that there’s continuity before it becomes a permanent category beginning next year.

I didn’t vote in the Lodestar (YA) not-a-Hugo, but this year I think it’s another example of the dedication of Hugo readers. (Unless there’s a Suzanne Collins backlash that I have missed.) Collins led by a wide margin when nominations were made, and Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe by C.B. Lee was fifth among nominations. Sunrise on the Reaping had four times as many nominations as Coffeeshop. But Lee’s book kept picking up votes throughout the rounds, especially the last two before the final runoff when it finally passed Sunrise. That doesn’t happen without voters actually reading the works and considering them independently of the authors’ overall reputations.

My top pick didn’t match the voters’ choice in the categories where I leaned heavily on the Readers’ Packet (and by “leaned heavily” I mostly mean “relied entirely” — Best Fan Artist; Best Fan Writer; Best Fanzine; Best Professional Artist; Best Editor, Long Form; Best Editor, Short Form), but I wasn’t invested enough in any of those categories to have strong views one way or another.

I was a little sad to see the Old Man’s War series beat out The Chronicles of Osreth, which is The Goblin Emperor and the related novellas that have followed. I’m not surprised, and Scalzi‘s series was my number two anyway, but Addison’s work is doing something valuable and different in fantasy, and it’s not likely to be eligible again. I was more bummed to see that Mary Robinette Kowal‘s Lady Astronaut series was not eligible (not enough new work since its last nomination in the category). I was also a little disappointed to find out that Nghi Vo‘s Singing Hills Cycle was also not eligible, but that was tempered by the reason, which was that they have not yet reached the threshold for total number of words for consideration as a series. I’m pretty confident that there will be more in this set from Vo, and I think they will be a well-deserved finalist when the series is big enough.

Doreen: I think the results of an anonymous and voluntary demographic poll of Hugo voters would be super interesting! That said, I don’t think I understand the correlation you’re trying to make between age and being a nominee: I don’t think being of a particular demographic ever precludes a creator from appealing to other demographics. I am also not the person to look to when knocking Oceania for anything outside of racism (and FIFA designations, lol,) as my best friend growing up was half-Australian and I idolized her white Australian mom. Since Australians and New Zealanders generally consider themselves part of the West tho, I absolutely lump them in with the Anglophile world. Ofc each member state has its own literary heritages but having the Hugos go further abroad culturally exposes us primarily English-speakers to even more diverse writing. Alas that we are not all as fluent in multiple languages as you are, Doug! The best thing about Chengdu, IMO, was the amount of interesting sff it put into translation for us to experience and enjoy. But I also appreciated the fact that it had an impact on local sff enthusiasts who finally had the chance to see what a WorldCon is like in person. I think I remember you telling me that one of the reasons WorldCon has so much trouble going to a lot of countries is the way the finances are structured, and how that can run afoul of local laws. Idk if there’s any way of fixing that but I do hope solutions can continue to be found.

I’m glad that Best Poem will be a regular thing now too. I haven’t read enough of any of the nominees for Best Series to have an opinion, so absolutely skipped that category. I do eventually want to read all the books in the packet that I didn’t vote on (I’m honestly pleased I even managed Shroud at this point) but mostly I like that it points me in the direction of good books I should read and might have otherwise missed.

Doug: I was trying to be a little bit facetious about Ireland and Australia because you had mentioned non–English speaking sites for Worldcon. I’ll take ‘Jokes That Land Badly’ for $200 please, Alex.

Counting Canadian cities as bilingual, there have been five Worldcons this century outside of the English-speaking world. Let me take a quick look at the list of Worldcons … The previous 25-year period gives two (The Hague and Winnipeg, which is probably generous to consider bilingual). Going further back, 1950–75 also gives two: Heidelberg and Toronto. Points to early fandom, I think, for getting to Toronto for the sixth Worldcon in 1948. (No Worldcons were held in the US war years of 1942–1945. Denvention, the third Worldcon, was held in the summer of 1941.)

I hope I didn’t come across as saying that being of a certain age precludes writing in particular categories. I was more curious about whether some sort of generational shift is happening. Some writers will be able to maintain a connection with teen readers even as the writers approach retirement age. (Jane Yolen was writing children’s book well into her 70s and 80s.) I also wonder whether YA, as a publishing/marketing category isn’t migrating a bit over time, that maybe some readers stick with authors and with the category more generally as they themselves get older. I see that my large local bookstore has a section labelled “New Adults,” which I don’t think was there a year or two ago.

Were there works that y’all wanted to say something about but that haven’t come up in the conversation yet?

Doreen: I think that about covers it! I am swamped with other reading as usual so I’m glad I was able to get to what I did, which was significantly more than in recent years. Looking forward to carving out time for more tho!

Emily: I’m always glad to get both your voter takes!

+++

Until next time!

(Please note, this conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.)