Owen Blacker

My 2026 Hugo nominations

book recsTV and film

Every year I keep meaning to blog my Hugo nominations and votes. Every year I forget. But it’s a 4-day weekend just after the noms deadline this year, so I figure I can prolly manage it.

For anyone who doesn’t know, the Hugo Awards are the awards for speculative fiction (largely science fiction, fantasy and horror). They’re quite US-focussed, as is the case for so many things that claim to be the “World” something (Science Fiction Society, in this case).

To nominate and vote, you need to be a member of the WSFS, which is as simple as paying US$50 — and if you’re worried about that as an expense, you could look at is as paying upfront for the Voters’ pack, where most of the finalists are available gratis to members. Last year that included all 6 finalists in each of the 4 main written fiction categories, 5 of the Best YA Book finalists (and an excerpt of the 6th), several of the works in the Best Series finalists, all the printed Best related Work finalists, several books from the Best Editor Longform finalists, a screener link for Wicked: Part 1, the screenplay for that and for Flow, 2 full episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks and evaluation codes for 4 of the 6 Best Game noms. From a purely financial perspective, it’s pretty good value for money. Though personally I’m much more interested in adding my queer, disabled, leftist perspective into what gets lauded as the best works of the year.

There are a bunch of big categories that receive a lot of nominations (Best Novel, Best Dramatic Presentation) and a hanful of lesser categories that don’t get the love; I try to nominate and vote in as many as I can, but I’ve omitted the down-ballot categories from here, as it’s a long-enough post already. These are mainly unsorted here, in the arbitrary order of my longlist doc.

Best Novel

Novel nominations

Honourable mentions (novels)

Best Novella

Novella nominations

Novellas are 17,500–40,000 words. Tor Publishing have been perceived to dominate the category for the last few years, so it is popular to ensure a balance of publishers in one’s novella nominations.

With the exception of Tochi Onyebunchi’s Harmattan Season, all the works I’ve nominated here have queer protagonists and are written by queer authors.

Novella honourable mentions

Also very queer

Best Novelette

Novelette nominations

Novelettes are 7,500–17,500 words. All of these nominees and hon-menshes are gorgeous, delightful pieces: often queer always moving.

Honourable novelette mentions

Best Short Story

Short story noms

My short story shortlist

There are so many other shorts that I simply didn’t get to this year, as is always the case.

Best Series

Best Graphic Story or Comic

I keep meaning to propose an amendment to split this award in twain. I mainly consume shorter related works — articles and the occasional YouTube short, rather than novels and longer videos — whereas these longer works are way more likely to get nominated. These skew heavy on written works because I really struggle to consume podcasts and video content. In any case, here are my noms and my shortlist; my first 2 noms are longform, the rest are all shortform.

Best Dramatic Presentation (longform)

Dramatic works are split into 2 categories, depending on whether or not they are over 90 minutes long, so longform are films and whole TV series. Anything that meets the nomination threshold in both categories (like I have nominated Andor both as a series and as an individual episode), will be excluded from the category where it gets fewer votes. I’ve actually bothered alphabetising these categories.

Longform BDP noms

These first 2 are no-brainers and I think it’s almost certain that 1 of them will win. The other most likely winners are the 3rd (my current obsession) or The Last of Us s2, which I didn’t nom mainly because I figure it’s near-guaranteed to get the noms in any case.

My longform BDP shortlist

Best Dramatic Presentation (shortform)

I didn’t finish Severance s2 before losing access to Apple TV+, so only 1 episode made my shortlist.

BDP shortform noms

BDP shortform shortlist

The preview image is a 2019 Hugo Award, featuring a base in ceramic created by Eleanor Wheeler, based on a design by Jim Fitzpatrick. The photo is by Bastun and is licenced CC BY-SA 4.0, via the Wikimedia Commons: 2019 Hugo Award.jpg