Stephen Graham Jones wins the Nebula for The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association announced its 61st Nebula Award winners on 6 June 2026 at its conference in Chicago. Best novel went to Stephen Graham Jones for The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, published by Saga in the US and Titan in the UK.

Amal El-Mohtar won the novella award for The River Has Roots. Thomas Ha won best novelette for "Uncertain Sons", and Effie Seiberg won best short story for "Laser Eyes Ain't Everything". Michelle Knudsen's Into the Wild Magic took the middle grade and young adult category.

The Nebulas now reach well beyond prose. This year's game writing award went to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the dramatic presentation award to the first season of Murderbot, and there were separate awards for comics and poetry.

For novelists, the headline result is a horror novel winning an award long associated with science fiction and fantasy. Jones has worked across genres for years, and the peer vote suggests that the boundary between horror and the rest of speculative fiction matters less to working writers than it does to bookshop shelving.

Source: SFWA: Introducing SFWA's 61st annual Nebula Award winners.