Contact Us

This site is maintained by the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee of the World Science Fiction Society Mark Protection Committee. The lead maintainer is Kevin Standlee.

If you have any questions regarding this site, please email us at the address below, or leave a comment here.

Email: info@thehugoawards.org

Please note that messages left here will be held for moderation as a precaution against comment spam.

If you would like to write by postal mail to the committee that maintains this site, you can send postal mail to:

Hugo Awards Marketing Committee
c/o Kevin Standlee
PO Box 242
Fernley NV 89408-0242
USA

Please do not send Hugo Award ballots to this address. Do not send us books for review or submission. There is no submission process for the Hugo Awards, and the Hugo Awards web site does not review or publish books.

140 thoughts on “Contact Us

  1. Hi, I am Pankaj Dubey from Jabalpur City in India.

    I want to know how can one fill the nominations for Science Fiction Awards. What is the full process of getting the award.

    Please Reply.
    Thanks
    Pankaj

    1. You cannot submit works for the Hugo Awards. Read Submissions on our web site and The Voting System for a full description of the process of getting the awards.

      The short version is that the members of the annual World Science Fiction Convention nominate works, and also vote on the final Award selection.

    1. The site worked for me at 20:07 on 2015/07/30, about twenty minutes after you posted your message.

      Questions about the 2015 Hugo Awards voting should go directly to the 2015 Hugo Awards Administrators, because they are the ones who are actually running the 2015 Hugo Awards. Anything sent to TheHugoAwards.org will simply be forwarded to them. Those of us here at TheHugoAwards.org are not the ones running the current Worldcon’s web site or the Hugo Awards voting at their web site, so we can’t directly do anything about voting issues with the current year’s Awards.

    2. My bad – it’s a JavaScript issue at my end. Switching to a different computer fixed it. 🙂

  2. When I finally came around to read all about the controversy which is hovering above the Hugo Awards this year, I couldn’t ignore the feeling of familiar. Then I realized what it reminded me about.. countless marketing attempts of big name companies gone wrong, because the internet hijacked them to troll, i.e. “Mountain Dew Names a New Flavor””and the #1 ending up being “Hitler did nothing wrong”. Of course they had no agenda, other than trolling people, so it isn’t really the same as this years Hugo Awards. Still I couldn’t ignore it.

    The internet and right-wing conspiracy nuts and those opposing them have now turned the awards into their private battlefield, their platform, their private joke and feel-good bubble. This is ridiculous, those people from both sites, the sad puppies and the ones opposing them have destroyed the Hugo Awards, and are turning the awards into a political rostrum, distracting from what the awards exclusively should be about. The quality of the books and nothing more.

    This is why in my opinion the organizers should think about abolishing the system of popular vote and having a jury instead.

    1. Hello!
      Could you recommend literature awards which results are not based on who published the book, the author’s fame, etc. The more I plunge into this field, the more sure I become of the idea that good books remain undiscovered.

      1. There are a massive number of awards in the SF/Fantasy field. The (now moribund) SF AwardsWatch site lists many awards, some of which are still active. However, all systems designed by human beings are likely to have some form of human bias built into them. Juried awards reflect the biases of the jurors. Popularly voted awards of various sorts are subject to biases of the electorate, whether or not there are any specific criteria for qualifying the vote. There are countless number of SF/F reviews and awards in the world, all of which are a reflection of the reviewers and organizers of those awards. There essentially is no way to produce a hermetically sealed, mathematically pure, totally unbiased evaluation system without human bias in the evaluation as subjective as science fiction and fantasy literature.

  3. Why insult nominees? Handing out asterisks was a huge insult. It’s supposed to be an awards ceremony , not a roast. So respect the nominees. Except Vox Day. Pour all the vitriol you like on him, with the excess spilling on JC Wright. But the others were basically innocent bystanders.

    1. Pete, on the assumption it was the first time you’ve watched the Hugos awarded – that wasn’t a roast. You must have missed the part about the most ballots and the largest number of supporting members. People were respectful; it was, outside of the number of No Awards, normal for the ceremony.

  4. I’ve noticed you have Book Editor’s Awards. I need an Editor who might have some knowledge of astrology. It’s a book that’s non-fiction & has gone into a countries politics, medicine & finding the reason for murder

    Can you help has there been any editors given a Hugo Award for astrology books & if so how do I find them

    Thank you

    1. Diane:

      The Hugo Awards web site does not offer editor referrals. We only record those editors who are shortlisted and win the Awards. To our knowledge, no editors have received Hugo Awards for a body of work including works on astrology.

  5. Hello, could you add RocketStackRank.com to the list of Third Party Recommendation Sites in the right sidebar? We not only do our own short fiction reviews, but we also include links to recommendations by other reviewers (Lois Tilton at Locus Online, Sam Tomaino at SFRevu, K. Tempest Bradford at io9, and @SFEditorsPicks on Twitter). Our Q&A explains our goals. http://www.rocketstackrank.com/p/qa.html Thank you.

  6. Hello,

    I am a Graduate Student at Montana State University, in Bozeman, Montana. I am looking at possibly doing my thesis project on the intersection of philosophy, science-fiction, and culture in America, framing it through historical methods. Does your organization keep substantial records, transcripts, letters, journals, etc… regarding the award process and the state of science-fiction in general? Specifically, I am looking at the 1950’s and 60’s genre.
    Thank you.

    1. Everything we have is on our web site. There are no additional records, nor is there the substantial amount of information you appear to be requesting in your question. We do not maintain libraries, research archives, piles of old papers, etc.

  7. How is it that a magazine is able to claim it is “Hugo-nominated” when it never appeared in the official list of nominees?

    1. The term “Hugo nominated” no longer has any official meaning. The official term, per the WSFS Constitution, is “finalist,” meaning “appeared on the final ballot.” This sometimes is called being “shortlisted.” It is possible to be “nominated” for a Hugo Award by a single person nominating that work, and therefore WSFS abandoned the word “nominee” and adopted “finalist,” which is less ambiguous. However, until relatively recently, the term “nominee” referred only to those people on the final ballot. We have not yet even cleaned up all such references within this web site.

      The use of “Hugo nominated” is now relatively meaningless, given that it only takes a single nomination (even of yourself) to be able to claim to be a “Hugo nominee,” and because it is impossible to verify given that administrative reports of works that did not make the final ballot omit works with fewer than five nominations.

      Feel free to point out to people claiming to be “Hugo nominees” that the usage has no real meaning, any more than it means anything to be a “Nobel Prize nominee” given the ease of “nomination” for the Nobel Prize.

  8. Dear Hugo’s every,

    I already check your rules, but I still have a question:

    “If I want to join Hugo Award in 2017, I must traslate my book first?”

    1. You do not “join” the Hugo Award. You cannot “submit” a work for the Hugo Award. Works are not selected by a small jury, but by nominations by the thousands of members of the World Science Fiction Convention who are eligible each year to nominate works. Read our article about Submissions for further detail.

      The Hugo Award is not only for works in English. Works published in any language are eligible. If your work was originally published in a language other than English and is then later translated into English, the English-language edition is also eligible for a Hugo Award.

      Generally speaking, the 2017 Hugo Awards are for works published in calendar year 2016, including translations into English from other languages.

  9. Ladies and Gentlemen: I’m a retired engineer living in Colorado Springs and am preparing to launch a Science Fiction writing contest for Colorado Springs area school children grades 6 through 12. We have funds for prizes and operations but are looking for sponsors to add prestige to our contest. We would love to add to our literature the Hugo Awards name to give our contest the conspicuous status to attract statewide attention.

    By way of this contest we hope to stimulate interest in our youth in careers in science, technology and math. My own background includes working for NASA on the Saturn V launch vehicle and Space Shuttle and on nuclear fusion at ORNL.

    1. The Hugo Awards generally does not endorse other events or contests in this way, primarily because the Awards are managed by a joint committee that covers multiple independent organizations, and getting the level of cooperation necessary to do this would be impractical.

    1. This is why the WSFS Business Meeting decided to change the wording used for the people/works on the final ballot to “Finalists” instead of “Nominees”. You can’t stop anyone calling themselves a “nominee” because they can nominate themselves, but you can laugh more easily at people who call themselves “finalists” when they quite clearly are not.

      By the way, there is no “committee”. Unless there is a clear breach of the WSFS service marks, no one but the Business Meeting has the power to do anything like this.

  10. Hello,

    There is an error on the page:

    http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-history/1977-hugo-awards/

    The Best Fan Writer list of finalists includes the name “Susan Wood Glicksohn” as the fourth in the list (“Susan Wood” properly appears second as the co-winner of the award). Checking the award info at the NESFA site suggests that this fourth finalist should actually read “Michael Glicksohn”.

    (Were the award pages on this site created by hand, or were they generated from a database? I’m wondering if the error might appear elsewhere.)

  11. Um, sorry about this followup, but I just checked the ISFDB, and that has “Susan Wood Glicksohn” as an actual pseudonym used by Susan Wood, and no entry for Michael Glicksohn. So… was Susan Wood actually nominated under two different names? Or is the ISFDB propagating an error from somewhere else?

  12. Well, now I feel dumb. The ISFDb doesn’t have loose matching, so it didn’t match “Michael Glicksohn” to the entry for “Mike Glicksohn”, Susan Wood’s husband.

    But! As best I can tell from their respective ISFdb pages, Susan Wood did not publish anything using the name “Susan Wood Glicksohn” in 1976, and so would presumably not have been eligible to be nominated for a Hugo under that name in 1977, whereas Mike Glicksohn did publish under his name in 1976, and therefore would have been eligible to be nominated. Therefore, it seems likely that what I pointed out as an error probably is an error, and the line should probably read “Mike Glicksohn”.

    I think.

  13. Greetings,

    Great site, with a wealth of wonderful information!

    Is there a file (pdf, text file) that I can download/access that lists all the winners/nominees?

    Instead of having to go the webpage that has each year separately, click on that year, search through the information, go back to the main page, click on the next year, search etc?

    Thank you in advance.

  14. Hi I’m writing a saturation paper. I was wondering if there is a video or something of the 1986 ceremony? Anything would really help. Thanks.

  15. I am also e-mailing this comment to you.

    This is just to give you a heads-up that the information on the web page http://www.thehugoawards.org/the-voting-system/ has been outdated by the approval of the E Pluribus Hugo amendment in the 2016 Worldcon. The system as it currently works is described accurately in section “How are Hugo nominations going to be tallied?” of page http://www.worldcon.fi/wsfs/hugo-new/.

    Also, the links “Do I have to nominate/vote in every category?” and “Do I have to have read or seen everything in a category to nominate?” at the top of page http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-faq do not link to anything. The latter link should probably link to the question in the body text, and that question should probably be shown in a bigger, bold font, just like the other questions.

    1. Thank you for pointing this out to us. We will update the material when we have an opportunity to do so.

      Kevin Standlee

  16. I am reaching out to you because I would like to confirm that Sesame Workshop (Sesame Street) won an award for the “Tree Use” episode back in 2011. Can you confirm that please? And if so, where would I be able to find that listing? Is there a website that we can cite?

    1. Leighann:

      That production neither won or was a finalist for the Hugo Award for science fiction and fantasy. It is possible that it won an award from the Chicago International Film Festival with a similar name; however, TheHugoAwards.org is the site of the Hugo Awards for achievement in science fiction and fantasy, presented since 1954 by the World Science Fiction Society and presented at the annual World Science Fiction Convention.

  17. Hi there, 

    I am a fourth year Journalism student at Carleton University. I am writing a story about Amal El Mohtar, who recently won a Hugo award. I was wondering if I could ask a couple of questions about the organization of the Hugo awards, either through email or over the phone. Thanks a bunch! 

    Matthew Horwood

    613-920-5409

  18. I’m kind of curious as to why the Hugo award is the shape of a rocket and not something else since the Hugo awards categories are both sci fi and fantasy.

    1. The Hugo Award is shaped the way it is because the people who first started the awards designed it that way, and that design is now specified in the WSFS Constitution. To change the design would require getting the members to vote for a change, which would be a large-scale undertaking. Furthermore, the design is increasingly well-known, and the society has spent a fair bit of its resources on getting the design (and the logo based on the design) registered as service marks, providing additional legal protection.

      As to why the original design was made, well, unfortunately, none of the people involved in making those decisions are with us anymore, and they did not leave behind much about why they made the decisions they did. However, bear in mind that for many years, the Hugo Award’s official name was “Science Fiction Achievement Award” (it was not until the 1990s that it was officially renamed “Hugo Award,” which had been the unofficial name). Even though as defined, the award has always been for SF and Fantasy (primarily due to the difficulty of making a distinction between SF/F — The Dragonriders of Pern is usually cited as the case example of the challenge here), the name of the award had “Science Fiction” in it, and we speculate that this is what was on the minds of those fans who designed the original rocket.

      “Science Fiction” and “Fantasy” are highly subjective classifications. It has been said that Hugo Gernsback himself dismissed nearly all early Hugo Award winners as “fantasy” rather than what he would have considered “science fiction.”

  19. It almost seems like the Hugo awards are like the Oscars in the world of sci fi and fantasy, but anyway does horror sci fi count or no?

    1. The Hugo Awards are explicitly for works of science fiction and fantasy. No work of horror fiction has ever been disqualified from consideration for the Hugo Awards. Only works that receive sufficient nominations to make the final ballot are ruled upon. The Award Administrators generally will not answer hypothetical questions. So if a work doesn’t get enough nominations to make the final ballot, they won’t make a decision about its eligibility.

    2. Of course SF Horror is eligible. The 4 Mira Grant novels which have been Hugo Finalists are SF Horror, as is Peter Watts’ Blindsight, and numerous other Finalist novels could be classified as SF / Fantasy Horror.

      There have been many SF/ Fantasy Horror Finalists in the shorter Hugo fiction categories as well; 3 of the 6 Novella Finalists for 2017 were Horror, and GRRM’s “Sandkings” and Charles Stross’ Equoids won Best Novelette and Best Novella, respectively.

      I’m not aware of the Hugo Administrators ever having disqualified a fiction Finalist because it was not speculative enough. They generally tend to rule that whatever the voters say is SFF is, indeed, SFF.

      1. Administrators are extremely reluctant to make subjective decisions about potential finalists. They rule on technical matters like publication date, length of work, etc. Because the question “is something SF or fantasy” is subjective, Administrators nearly always defer to the judgment of the membership, based on their nominating ballots.

  20. Hello.

    How might I obtain a photo of Camille Cazedessus receiving his Hugo award for best Fanzine in 1966?

    I wish to include it with an interview with Caz on my blog at Vancouvergazette..org

    1. Gabriel:

      See I Want to Vote for details. You had to be a member of the 2017, 2018, or 2019 Worldcons as of the end of 2017 in order to nominate works for the 2018 Hugo Awards and 1943 Retrospective Hugo Awards. If you were not a member of at least one of those three conventions as of December 31, 2017, you are not eligible to nominate. However, you can still vote on the final ballot when it comes out later this year if you join the current Worldcon. As a bonus, if you join this year’s Worldcon, you will also be eligible to nominate for next year’s Hugo Awards (and also the 1944 Retrospective Hugo Awards).

  21. I want to be a member of your esteemed members. Would love to participate into your events as International publisher and Writer

    1. To become a member of the World Science Fiction Society, which includes the right to participate in the selection of the Hugo Awards, joint the current World Science Fiction Convention as at least a supporting member. Membership in the current Worldcon includes membership in WSFS. See the Worldcon web site for links to the next two Worldcons, from whom you can buy your membership. You cannot purchase a membership directly from the WSFS or from TheHugoAwards.org. You must buy your membership from a Worldcon. The only way to join WSFS is to join the current Worldcon.

  22. Greetings,
    I am a librarian in a public library of a town in China. I am very interested in the works of the professional artists of the Hugo Award over the years. I would like to hold a Public welfare Exhibition about these works in our library. Could you tell me how can we get the copyright of these works? We only need in E-editions. Thanks.

    1. Neither the Hugo Awards web site nor the World Science Fiction Society manage the copyrights of these works. You need to contact the individual rights holders for each work to use those works.

  23. Dear Hugo Awards people of the planet.
    In the light of Elon Musk’s presentation of their giant silver prototype starship,
    I wish to suggest that you award SpaceX and or whoever appropriate the 2020 Hugo award.
    Transforming such an image from early science fiction into reality surely takes the cake!!! A true achievement on science fiction. “The Martian Chronicles ”

    In case this sets a precedent please make sure there will be no award for Andromeda strains.

    1. Hugo Awards are not awarded by a committee or board of directors or executive by fiat. They are presented in the categories listed here on our web site, and works have to be nominated by and voted upon by the members of the World Science Fiction Convention. So you can’t just “give a trophy to Elon Musk because I think his rocket is cool looking.”

  24. Seriously? You award the Hugo Award for Best Novel to “The Calculating Stars?” This book doesn’t even have good science: an extinction event would have left most of the Eastern US population dead within minutes or hours and this is just the most egregious error.

    How far the Hugo has fallen to award what was once a prestigious award to a book that is little more than a soap opera.

    1. The winner of the Hugo Award is the work that received the majority of the votes of the members of the World Science Fiction Society. That means it was the favored work selected by the thousands of members of the World Science Fiction Convention. As with anything subjective, “best” is a matter of taste.

  25. Buenas tardes.
    Quisiera saber cual es el motivo por el cual no hay Premio Retro Hugo para el año 1952.
    Muchas gracias por la información.
    Saludos

    1. [Good afternoon.
      I would like to know what is the reason why there is no Retro Hugo Award for the year 1952.
      Thank you very much for the information.]

      The first opportunity to present the 1952 Retrospective Hugo Award would have been 2002. The 2002 Worldcon decided to not present Retro Hugo Awards. Under current rules, the next opportunity to present Retro Hugo Awards for 1952 will be at the 2027 Worldcon.

      Worldcons are not required to present Retro-Hugo Awards. They are authorized to do so in years in which there was no Hugo Award presented from 1939 onward an even multiple of 25 years in the future; however, they do not have to do so. The decision to present Retro Hugo Awards is entirely up to the individual Worldcon committee.

      [La primera oportunidad para presentar el Premio Hugo Retrospectivo de 1952 habría sido 2002. La Worldcon 2002 decidió no presentar los Premios Hugo Retro. Según las reglas actuales, la próxima oportunidad de presentar los Premios Retro Hugo para 1952 será en la Worldcon 2027.

      Los Worldcons no están obligados a presentar premios Retro-Hugo. Están autorizados a hacerlo en los años en los que no se entregó el Premio Hugo a partir de 1939, un múltiplo par de 25 años en el futuro; sin embargo, no es necesario que lo hagan. La decisión de presentar los Retro Hugo Awards depende totalmente del comité individual de Worldcon.]

    1. Works published anywhere in the world are eligible for the Hugo Award, regardless of county of publication or language. Nominations are made by the thousands of members of the World Science Fiction Convention, not by a small awards jury or committee.

    1. There is no newsletter for the Hugo Awards. For news of the Worldcon and the Hugo Awards, join the current Worldcon. See the links on our pages to future Worldcons.

  26. I have written a sci-fi trilogy. It is yet unpublished. Can I submit the entire trilogy for consideration for the HUGO or to other sci-fi award orgs?

  27. Hi, Kevin—I was looking at the nomination and voting stats for all years that are available, and I found that the results page for 1975 mistakenly links to the voting stats page for 1976. Obviously to be rectified at some point in future!

  28. It’s coming up on a month since Worldcon and detailed voting statistics aren’t available yet. Can we expect to see them?

    Thanks,
    Dan

    1. Dan:

      The detailed voting statistics are the responsibility of each year’s Worldcon committee and are not prepared by the Hugo Awards website. We just publish the results when they are provided to us. Per section 3.12.3 of the WSFS Constitution, “The complete numerical vote totals,… shall be made public by the Worldcon Committee within ninety (90) days after the Worldcon.”

      Direct questions about the 2023 Hugo Awards to the 2023 Worldcon committee’s Hugo Awards Administration Subcommittee. The Hugo Awards website team knows nothing more than what we have published.

  29. Why were Babel and Xiran Jay Zhao inelegible for the 2023 Hugo Awards? There was no explanation or referral to where in the constitution we can find what made them ineligible.

    1. You have to ask the 2023 Hugo Award Administrators. The Hugo Awards website does not administer the Hugo Awards. Each year’s Worldcon is a legally independent entity that runs the Hugo Awards for their year.

  30. People have been asking the administrators but not getting any actual answers. A quick explanation about why they were ineligible would go a long way. I thought the whole point of the Hugos was that they were presented at the Worldcon but were independent of the Worldcon itself?

  31. Why were Xiran Jay Zhao and others disqualified from the Hugos? This seems like political censorship. Speculative fiction has always been a medium to expand our ideas of what can be; political censorship has no place in what is supposed to be a prestigious award in speculative fiction. Please clarify this matter for all of us. Thank you.

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