The 15 Novellas Nominated for 2026 Locus, Nebula and Hugo Awards

This Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards are three of the most well known genre awards recognizing excellence in science fiction, fantasy and horror. The awards go to various different types of works including novellas, which are short works of fiction between 80 – 160 pages long (longer than a short story, shorter than a novel).

Below are the 15 novellas that have nominated across all 3 awards in 2026. You’ll find a very diverse mix including cozy robot restaurants, gothic fairy tale retellings, murder mysteries set in space, fairy tales about sisters and Faerie, witches and curses, haunted coal mines, and climate allegories told from a mountain’s point of view. The first two on the list appear on all three major award ballots this year. If you’re not sure where to start reading, these are the ones generating the most buzz.

Automatic Noodle, Annalee Newitz

🚀 Hugo ✨ Nebula 📖 Locus

Genre: Cozy Sci-Fi | Pages: 163

In a near-future San Francisco still rebuilding from a devastating war of independence from the rest of the United States, a group of deactivated food-service robots come back online in an abandoned ghost kitchen. With no human oversight and a debt they must pay to stay free, they make a bold decision: open their own restaurant, serving the city’s most exceptional hand-pulled noodles. When a targeted wave of one-star fake reviews threatens to tank their business, the bots must investigate the sabotage and call on their community to survive in a world that wasn’t built for them.

The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar

🚀 Hugo ✨ Nebula 📖 Locus

Genre: Fairy Tale / Folk Fantasy | Pages: 133

Follow the river Liss to the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, where the Hawthorn family tends enchanted willow trees and honors an ancient compact through song. Sisters Esther and Ysabel share an unbreakable bond — until Esther’s secret love for a fairy named Rin, and the jealous violence of a rejected suitor, sets off a chain of events that transforms both sisters forever. Rooted in murder ballads and folk tradition, with magic called “grammar” that bends the tenses of time itself, this is the long-awaited solo debut of the co-author of This Is How You Lose the Time War.

Cinder House, Freya Marske

🚀 Hugo 📖 Locus

Genre: Gothic Fairy Tale Romance | Pages: 144

You think you know Cinderella. You’re halfway right and all-the-way wrong. Murdered at sixteen, Ella’s ghost is furiously trapped in her father’s house – invisible to everyone except the stepmother and stepsisters who killed her. When she discovers how to untether herself from her prison, the rules are strict: she cannot be seen or heard by the living, and at every midnight she returns to the staircase where she died. Until a wary friendship with a fairy charm-seller earns her three nights of almost-living freedom – a chance to finally be seen, danced with, and touched.

Murder by Memory, Olivia Waite

🚀 Hugo 📖 Locus

Genre: Cozy Sci-Fi Mystery | Pages: 103

Welcome to the HMS Fairweather, the most luxurious interstellar passenger liner in the galaxy where room and board are included, new bodies are provided upon request, and your mind is safely preserved in glass in the ship’s Library between lifetimes. Ship’s detective Dorothy Gentleman wakes unexpectedly in a body that isn’t hers, just as a murder is discovered. Someone has found a way to make death on the Fairweather permanent and destroying memory books so the dead cannot be revived. Dorothy must solve her most impossible case yet, all while navigating a new body, an intriguing yarn-store owner, and a killer who may have had three hundred years to perfect their scheme.

What Stalks the Deep, T. Kingfisher

🚀 Hugo 📖 Locus

Genre: Gothic Horror | Pages: 179

Series: Sworn Soldier #3

Alex Easton does not want to visit America and they particularly don’t want to descend into an abandoned, reputedly haunted coal mine in 1890s West Virginia. But when their old friend Dr. Denton summons them to help find his lost cousin, who vanished while investigating a mysterious red light deep in the shafts of Hollow Elk Mine, a sworn soldier does what a sworn soldier must. A claustrophobic, Lovecraft-adjacent horror adventure that balances genuine dread with Easton’s signature dry wit.

The Summer War, Naomi Novik

🚀 Hugo

Genre: Fantasy / Fairy Tale | Pages: 144

When twelve-year-old Celia watches her beloved older brother Argent leave for war, her angry, desperate words unexpectedly carry the weight of prophecy cursing him to a life stripped of love. As Celia grows into her accidental power as a witch, she searches for a way to undo the damage she caused, only to discover the truth behind a centuries-long war between her people and the immortal “summerlings” and realize that undoing the curse may require sacrificing everything she thought she wanted.

The Orb of Cairado, Katherine Addison

📖 Locus

Genre: Fantasy Mystery | Pages: 120

Set in the world of the beloved Goblin Emperor, this companion novella follows Ulcetha Zhorvena, a disgraced historian who was framed for theft five years ago and lost everything. Now writing fake provenances for stolen artifacts to survive, Ulcetha is shocked when his best friend Mara dies in the same airship explosion that kills the emperor, and Mara’s final gift leads him to a puzzle he cannot resist: a trail of clues pointing straight back to the university that destroyed him and possibly to the chance to clear his name at last.

Making History, K.J. Parker

📖 Locus

Genre: Dark Fantasy / Political Satire | Pages: 128

History isn’t truth – it’s propaganda. When a newly installed tyrant needs a historically legitimate excuse to go to war with his neighbors, he summons a dozen professors from his kingdom’s university and gives them an impossible command: invent an ancient civilization from scratch, complete with archaeology, language, and artifacts convincing enough to justify conquest. Refusal means death. Our narrator – a cynical linguist tasked with creating a dead language that could have been real – finds the project intellectually irresistible, even as its moral implications grow increasingly dark.

Psychopomp & Circumstance, Eden Royce

📖 Locus

Genre: Southern Gothic Historical Fantasy | Pages: 163

Phee St. Margaret is a daughter of the Reconstruction era born to a family of free Black business owners in an alternate, magic-infused New Charleston, South Carolina. Sheltered to the point of stifling by a mother determined to see her marry well, Phee yearns for the chance to prove herself capable of more. When word arrives that her estranged Aunt Cleo has died, Phee seizes the opportunity to become the “pomp”, the honored role of planning the funeral service, and finds herself stepping into a legacy of family secrets, magic, and unfinished business far bigger than she imagined.

Lives of Bitter Rain, Adrian Tchaikovsky

📖 Locus

Genre: Grimdark Fantasy | Pages: 126

Series: Tyrant Philosophers

In the world of the acclaimed Tyrant Philosophers series, the ruthless Palleseen Empire sends armies to “perfect” the world, but before the armies come Outreach: the diplomatic corps who convert enemies into friends and topple imperfect societies from within using only words. This novella is the life story of Angilly, a child of Pal soldiers who grows, through a sequence of accidents and questionable choices, into one of Outreach’s most formidable operators, traveling from Jarrokir to Bracinta to Usmai, learning exactly what price the empire’s success demands from those who carry it forward.

A Mouthful of Dust, Nghi Vo

📖 Locus

Genre: Fantasy / Horror | Pages: 112

Series: Singing Hills Cycle #6

Wandering Cleric Chih of Singing Hills and their hoopoe companion Almost Brilliant travel to the river town of Baolin, drawn by stories of a legendary famine that devastated the region eighteen years past. The town is still haunted by it … literally. Amid tales of dishes served to royalty and desperate survival, Chih discovers the ugly secrets of what the powerful will do to hide their crimes, and finds themselves trapped in the manor of a sinister magistrate as the things in the shadows grow hungrier still.

But Not Too Bold, Hache Pueyo

✨ Nebula

Genre: Gothic Monster Romance | Pages: 115

The old keeper of the keys is dead, consumed by the volatile Lady of the Capricious House, Anatema, an enormous humanoid spider with a taste for laudanum and human brides. Dália, the late keeper’s protégée, takes up the duties of locking and unlocking the drawers in which Anatema stores her memories. If Dália can unravel the crime that led to her predecessor’s end, she might survive long enough to grow into her role. There is, however, a gaping hole in her plan: Anatema cannot resist a beautiful woman, and she devours every single bride who crosses her path.

The Death of Mountains, Jordan Kurella

✨ Nebula

Genre: Climate Fiction / Fabulism | Pages: 122

When the Death of Mountains arrives for a weary, strip-mined hill in the Appalachians, the mountain doesn’t intend to go gently. In a Scheherazade-esque exchange of stories and questions — the mountain delaying its own end through the telling of tales — this remarkable novella explores what it means to be a mountain, the deep wounds humans have inflicted on the land through centuries of extraction, and what it might look like for nature to resist. A fabulist, hopepunk climate allegory narrated from the perspective of the land itself.

Disgraced Return of the Kap’s Needle, Renan Bernardo

✨ Nebula

Genre: Speculative Fiction | Pages: 128

This novella follows a disgraced figure navigating the weight of a past they cannot escape and a homecoming that refuses to be simple.

Descent, Wole Talabi

✨ Nebula

Genre: Science Fantasy | Available FREE online via Clarkesworld Magazine – Print & Audio

A Sauútiverse novella set on a raging planet of storms, exploring traditional African epistemology, the limits of knowledge, and the weight of parental expectations.

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Locus Award winners are revealed May 30, 2026 in Berkeley, CA. Nebula Award winners will be announced June 6, 2026 in Chicago. Hugo winners will be announced August 30, 2026 at LAcon V in Anaheim, California.