Locus Awards 2020s: A decade of winners

The early 2020s marked a fascinating inflection point for the Locus Awards, the reader-voted prizes that have quietly shaped speculative fiction discourse since 1978. As the publishing industry grappled with everything from pandemic disruptions to urgent conversations about representation, the Locus Awards winners reflected a field that was simultaneously honoring established voices and urgently amplifying new ones. Seanan McGuire’s Middlegame kicked off the decade with its intricate metafictional complexity, while Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth announced itself as a phenomenon that would resonate far beyond the genre community. These weren’t just wins—they were cultural markers of what readers were hungry for: ambitious worldbuilding, queer narratives, and stories that pushed against the boundaries of their genres.

What’s particularly striking about tracing the Locus Awards through this period is how certain authors became consistent voices in the conversation. Martha Wells dominated the latter half of the decade, claiming wins in both the science fiction and fantasy categories, signaling reader trust in her particular brand of intricate, character-driven storytelling. Charlie Jane Anders similarly proved to be a fixture across multiple categories, particularly in the Young Adult space, suggesting that the Locus voting base was rewarding writers capable of working across genre boundaries with equal sophistication. The decade also saw Babel, or the Necessity of Violence by R. F. Kuang take the fantasy prize in 2023—a scholarly gothic thriller that felt distinctly of-the-moment—while P. Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn showed how the First Novel category had become a launchpad for voices bringing fresh cultural perspectives to speculative traditions.

Below, you’ll find the complete list of Locus Award winners across the decade, organized by year and category. Dive in to see the full picture of what readers were voting for during one of speculative fiction’s most generative periods.