Wednesday, February 2, 2022

2022 Nerds of a Feather Hugo Awards Recommended Reading, Part 3: Individual Categories

Welcome to the third part of the Nerds of a Feather 2022 Hugo Award Longlist. Today we take a look at the categories recognizing individuals for their body of work during 2021:  Editor (Short and Long Form), Professional Artist, Fan Artist, Fan Writer, and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer

As before, we here at 'nerds of a feather, flock together' are presenting a collective longlist of potential Hugo nominees that we think are worthy of your consideration. These selections represent the spectrum of tastes, tendencies, and predilections found among our group of 13 writers.

As a reminder, this list should not at all be considered comprehensive. There are some truly outstanding editors, writers, and artists who will not make our longlist because we couldn't confirm they produced enough qualifying work, because the work they do is not genre-focused, or for the very simple reason that we are not just familiar with what they did during 2021. We encourage you to think of this as a list of candidates to consider alongside works which you are already familiar, nothing more and nothing less. In addition, while we have done our best to check the eligibility of everything here, some of these categories (*cough* pro and fan artist *cough*) have eligibility requirements that can be hard to triangulate from an outside perspective. If you think we've made any errors in our categorisation, please get in touch.

In an effort at brevity (you may scoff) and perhaps at propriety, for these categories we have decided to simply list the individuals we are collectively recommending as part of the longlist, rather than detailing why each person listed below is awesome.

Finally, in the interests of being transparent, while it may worth noting that we, the writers of Nerds of a Feather are individually eligible for the Fan Writer category; because it is a conflict of interest, it would not appropriate to include any of us on our formal longlist (feel free to check out our Awards Eligibility post, though).

Nerds of a Feather 2022 Recommendation List Series:

Editor, Long
As always, we haven't got any specific names for this section, but we recommend that when you put together your final nominating ballot that you also look at who the editors were for your Best Novel selections and consider them for nomination for Editor, Long Form

Editor, Short


Professional Artist (Example of 2021 Work)



Fan Artist (Example of 2021 work)


(Note: As mentioned above, the distinction between Hugo pro and fan artist categories can be difficult to navigate from the outside. We've erred on the side of including Semiprozine cover artists in Fan Artist, but if you know of any errors in our categorisation please let us know!)


Fan Writer



Astounding Award for Best New Writer (Example of Work)

E.J. Beaton (The Councillor)
Gautam Bhatia (The Wall)
Coleman, Kel (Various Short Fiction)
Tracy Deonn (Legendborn)
Lindsay Ellis (Axiom's End) 
Simon Jimenez (The Vanished Birds)
Micaiah Johnson (The Space Between Worlds)
P.H. Low (Various short fiction and poetry)
A.K. Larkwood (The Unspoken Name)
Shelley Parker-Chan (She Who Became the Sun)
Lauren Ring (Various Short Fiction)
Xiran Jay Zhao (Iron Widow)
Filip Hajdar Drnovsek Zorko (Various Short Fiction)