Living Canon

Nebula Awards 2015: Complete list of winners

The 2015 Nebula Awards ceremony brought some genuinely surprising winners to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s annual celebration of excellence. This year’s selections felt particularly diverse in their storytelling approaches—from Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, which took home Best Novel with its fresh take on fantasy romance, to the wildly imaginative novella winner Binti by Nnedi Okorafor, a stunning space opera that announced itself as essential reading. The Nebula Awards, which have been honoring the year’s best science fiction and fantasy works since 1966, continued their tradition of recognizing both established talents and exciting new voices across every category.

What stood out most about this year’s Nebula Award winners was how thoroughly they reshaped genre expectations. Alyssa Wong’s haunting short story “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” earned recognition alongside Fran Wilde’s Updraft, a young adult novel that proved YA speculative fiction deserved its own spotlight in the awards conversation. Sarah Pinsker’s “Our Lady of the Open Road” rounded out the major categories with a novelette that blended Americana with thoughtful science fiction worldbuilding. Together, these five works represented the kind of imaginative, character-driven storytelling that defines the best of contemporary speculative fiction.

Below, you’ll find the complete breakdown of the 2015 Nebula Awards winners across all major categories.

Best Novel

Best Novelette

  • Our Lady of the Open Road by Sarah Pinsker

Best Novella

  • Cover of Binti Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

Best Short Story

Best Young Adult