Hugo Award Winners 2025

The Hugo Awards, science fiction and fantasy's most venerable honor, have been presented annually since 1953 by attending members of the World Science Fiction Convention. They reflect the tastes and passions of the genre's most committed readers—the fans themselves—and winning one is both a validation and an invitation into a conversation that has shaped speculative fiction for seven decades.

At Seattle Worldcon on August 16, 2025, the 83rd Worldcon brought a striking slate of winners that reflects where the field stands today: indigenous futures, climate reckoning, fantasy that reinvents the murder mystery, and young adult fiction that refuses to talk down. Robert Jackson Bennett's The Tainted Cup won Best Novel, a baroque fantasy whodunit that marries Sherlockian deduction to Lovecraftian cosmic horror—proof that genre-bending storytelling can also be the year's most commercially successful fantasy. Ray Nayler's The Tusks of Extinction took Best Novella for its searing ecological parable about resurrected mammoths and what we owe the natural world.

Rebecca Roanhorse completed a remarkable achievement with Best Series for Between Earth and Sky, a trilogy inspired by Pre-Columbian civilizations that rewrites the epic fantasy rulebook from an indigenous Americas perspective. Black Sun, Fevered Star, and the concluding Mirrored Heavens together form one of the decade's most ambitious fantasy undertakings. The Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book went to Darcie Little Badger's Sheine Lende, a Lipan Apache ghost story set in 1970s Texas that earns its place beside the most celebrated novels of the year. And the Astounding Award for Best New Writer honored Moniquill Blackgoose, whose debut To Shape a Dragon's Breath reimagines dragons within the world of the Wampanoag—a revelatory first novel announcing a major new voice.

Read together, these books sketch a portrait of a genre expanding its perspective. Indigenous storytelling is no longer at the margins but at the center; ecological and ethical reckoning runs through nearly every winner; and formal invention—from murder mystery to novella to trilogy—proves science fiction and fantasy remain the most restless and generous of literary forms. This is the shape of the field in 2025: confident, varied, and newly necessary.