Tade Thompson won the award for Best Shorter Fiction for his novella The Apologists, while Eugen Bacon received Best Non-Fiction (Short) for her essay “Spec Fic and the Politics of Identity: Finding the Self”.
By Abioye Damilare Samson
British-Nigerian writer Tade Thompson and African-Australian author Eugen Bacon are among the winners of the 2026 British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards, announced on April 5 at Eastercon in Birmingham, England.
Thompson won the award for Best Shorter Fiction for his novella The Apologists, published in Clarkesworld, while Bacon received Best Non-Fiction (Short) for her essay “Spec Fic and the Politics of Identity: Finding the Self”, published in Strange Horizons.
Both writers were among a wider group of African and diaspora authors featured across the awards shortlist, which continues to reflect the growing visibility of African speculative fiction within British genre publishing and criticism spaces.
In the Best Shorter Fiction category, Nigerian writer Wole Talabi was shortlisted for his story Descent. South African author Cheryl S. Ntumy was also shortlisted in the Best Collection category for Black Friday, while Zimbabwean writer T.L. Huchu earned a nomination in Best Fiction for Younger Readers for Secrets of the First School.
Established in 1970, the BSFA Awards are presented annually by the British Science Fiction Association. Winners are determined through votes cast by BSFA members and attendees of Eastercon, the United Kingdom’s national science fiction convention.
Thompson and Bacon’s wins sit within a broader trajectory of increasing recognition for African speculative fiction within global genre institutions, where African writers are not only participating in established science fiction traditions but actively reshaping them through new narrative frameworks, critical perspectives, and culturally grounded approaches to the speculative form.