Living Canon

Nebula Awards 1966: Complete list of winners

The 1966 Nebula Awards marked a pivotal moment for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, showcasing a year when the genre proved it could explore profound human questions alongside futuristic spectacle. Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon claimed the Best Novel award, a gut-wrenching story about a man whose intelligence is artificially enhanced and then stripped away—a work that would go on to become one of science fiction’s most enduring classics. The novel’s victory signaled that the Nebula Awards, still in their relative infancy as a peer-voted honor, valued emotional depth and philosophical inquiry just as much as imaginative world-building.

The rest of the 1966 Nebula Awards winners showcased the breadth of the field that year. Jack Vance’s The Last Castle won Best Novella with its intricate tale of a dying Earth, while Gordon R. Dickson’s “Call Him Lord” took the Novelette prize with a story exploring power dynamics and human nature. Richard McKenna’s “The Secret Place” completed the roster as Best Short Story winner, rounding out a year that felt distinctly focused on the interior lives of characters navigating extraordinary circumstances. These awards remain significant not just for identifying quality work, but for demonstrating how seriously the science fiction community was taking its own craft during the mid-1960s.

Below you’ll find the complete list of 1966 Nebula Awards winners across all categories.

Best Novel

Best Novelette

Best Novella

Best Short Story