Here are the winners of the 2026 Nebula Awards

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) held its annual Nebula Awards Conference this weekend in Chicago, and as part of the festivities, it's announced the winners of this year's Nebula Awards. The Nebulas are an annual award for excellence in the science fiction and fantasy genres published in the last year, voted on by members of the organization.

As I noted earlier this spring in the initial finalists announcement, I thought that 2025 was a particularly strong year for SF/F books, and a bunch of the books that I really liked, like Automatic Noodle, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Death of the Author, and Katabasis – were on the finalist list, as well as a bunch of the TV shows and films.

I was pretty happy to see that Stephen Graham Jones' The Buffalo Hunter Hunters ended up with Best novel – I think it was a spectacular, gripping read, and I'll have to check out the other winners when I get a free moment.

Here are the winners from 2025, 2024, 2023, and 2022. Here are this year's winners and finalists (winners are marked in bold)

Best Novel

• When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory
• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
• Katabasis by R.F. Kuang
• Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
• The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
• Sour Cherry by Natalia Theodoridou
• Wearing the Lion by John Wiswell

Best Novella

• Disgraced Return of the Kap's Needle by Renan Bernardo
• The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
• The Death of Mountains by Jordan Kurella
• Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz
• But Not Too Bold by Hache Pueyo
• “Descent” by Wole Talabi (Clarkesworld Magazine 5/25)

Best Novelette

• “Our Echoes Drifting Through the Marsh” by Marie Croke (Beneath Ceaseless Skies 1/9/25)
• “Uncertain Sons” by Thomas Ha (Uncertain Sons)
• “We Begin Where Infinity Ends” by Somto Ihezue (Clarkesworld Magazine 2/25)
• The Name Ziya by Wen-Yi Lee (Tor)
• “Never Eaten Vegetables” by H.H. Pak (Clarkesworld Magazine 1/25)
• “The Life and Times of Alavira the Great as Written by Titos Pavlou and Reviewed by Two Lifelong Friends” by Eugenia Triantafyllou (Uncanny Magazine 3-4/25)

Best Short Story

• “Through the Machine” by P.A. Cornell (Lightspeed Magazine, 5/25)
• “Six People to Revise You” by J.R. Dawson (Uncanny Magazine, 1-2/25)
• “In My Country” by Thomas Ha (Clarkesworld Magazine 4/25)
• “The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead” by E.M. Linden (PodCastle 2/18/25)
• “Because I Held His Name Like a Key” by Aimee Ogden (Strange Horizons 6/16/25)
• “Laser Eyes Ain't Everything” by Effie Seiberg (Diabolical Plots 5/25)

Andre Norton Award for Best Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction

• The Tower by David Anaxagoras
• Gemini Rising by Jonathan Brazee
• Wishing Well, Wishing Well by Jubilee Cho
• Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
• Into the Wild Magic by Michelle Knudsen
• Goblin Girl by K.A. Mielke

Best Game Writing

• Spire, Surge, and Sea, Stewart C. Baker (Choice of Games)
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Guillaume Broche & Jennifer Svedberg-Yen (Kepler Interactive), Developer: Sandfall Interactive, Sandfall S.A.S.
• Hollow Knight: Silksong, Ari Gibson & William Pelen (Team Cherry)*
• Dispatch, Ashley Jeffalone, Suzee Matson, Chris Rebbert, Chad Rhiness, & Pierre Shorette (AdHoc Studios)
• Hades II, Greg Kasavin (Supergiant Games)
• Blue Prince, Tonda Ros (Raw Fury, Developer: Dogubomb)

*Provisional nomination; awaiting acceptance and response on LLM-use.

Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

• KPop Demon Hunters, Danya Jimenez, Maggie Kang, & Hannah McMechan (Netflix)
• Sinners, Ryan Coogler (Warner Bros Pictures)
• Severance, "Chikhai Bardo", by Dan Erickson & Mark Friedman (Apple TV+)
• Pluribus: Season One, Vince Gilligan (Apple TV+)
• Superman, James Gunn (Warner Bros Pictures)
• Murderbot: Season One, Chris Weitz (Apple TV+)

Best Comic

• Second Shift by Kit Anderson
• Carmilla Volume 3: The Eternal by Amy Chu
• Helen of Wyndhorn by Tom King
• Fishflies by Jeff Lemire
• Mary Shelley's School for Monsters: The Killing Stone by Jessica Maison
• Strange Bedfellows by Ariel Slamet Ries
• The Flip Side by Jason Walz
• The Stoneshore Register by G. Willow Wilson

Best Poem

• “Though You Always Are” by Linda D. Addison & Jamal Hodge (Everything Endless)
• “They Said Robots Are” by Casey Aimer (Penumbric 6/25)
• “The World To Come” by Jennifer Hudak (Strange Horizons 12/22/25)
• “The Mourning Robot” by Angela Liu (Uncanny Magazine 9-10/25)
• “Care for Lightning” by Mari Ness (Uncanny Magazine 1-2/25)
• “To Be the Change” by Nico Martinez Nocito (Strange Horizons 3/10/25)

What do you think about this year's slate of winners?