FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Celebrating David Langford, SFWA’s Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award Recipient for the 61st Annual Nebula Awards

San Francisco, CA – March 31, 2026

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association is pleased to announce that the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award will be presented this year to David Langford at the 61st Annual SFWA Nebula Awards® ceremony on June 6, 2026.

The Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award is bestowed by SFWA upon a person who has made significant contributions to the community sustaining science fiction, fantasy, and related genres. The award was created in 2008, with Wilhelm named as one of the three original recipients, and it was renamed in her honor in 2016. Our latest recipient joins a storied list of winners, including Greg Bear, Ben Bova, Octavia Butler, Neil Clarke, Gardner Dozois, Joanna Russ, Stanley Schmidt, Nisi Shawl, Arley Sorg, and Sheila Williams, among many others.

How does one do justice to the work of a science-fiction creator whose wide-ranging pursuits, publications, and accolades include the long-standing and ongoing curation of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (SFE) itself?

As SFWA President Kate Ristau notes, “With his work on The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Langford has not only built, supported, and challenged the field of SFF; he has literally helped to define it. His decades of work have made science fiction a richer and more inclusive field. We are more than happy to present him with the Solstice Award in recognition of his career filled with positive, focused, and uplifting contributions.”

A Pillar of Service to Community

Those decades of service to our genre have taken many forms, all necessary for a thriving ecosystem in SFF publishing. Published authors of science fiction and fantasy are made possible by avid readers, equally avid commentators, fans dedicated to the cultivation of spaces to share and discuss great work, historians and archivists marking down events in genre of note, non-fiction writers offering supplement and story-seed to all our fantastic prose, editors sharpening one and the same, and publishers painstakingly building homes for all of the above.

Langford has been all of these, and more. He has handily merited his record-holding 29 Hugo wins out of 55 nominations, among a wealth of other honors in genre. Nor has his service to our ever-expanding community reached an end; along with SFE, Langford continues to sustain Ansible, a UK newszine covering SFF events and happenstance.

Langford’s dedication isn’t just known through titles, either, but also in his tonal range. Here is a commentator who would make readers laugh on one genre outing, then inspire serious reflection with the next. For decades, Langford’s editorial work took care where care was needed with the living history of our medium. His fan-community work brought joy where joy was needed in SFF, too.

“I am delighted to celebrate David Langford as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Association 2026 Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award recipient,” says SFWA Executive Director Isis Asare. “His witty sense of humor and encylopedic knowledge of speculative literature has fostered an international discourse on science fiction. The measure of Langford’s impact cannot be overstated.”

The Celebration Continues

Please join SFWA in celebrating the achievements of David Langford, and all our other special guests and Nebula finalists, this June 3-7 at our 61st Annual Nebula Awards Conference in Chicago, Illinois. Conference prices for in-person tickets rise May 1, and Banquet tickets for the acclaimed Nebula Awards Ceremony on June 6 are in limited supply.

Be part of our ongoing history, in a genre that dedicated community-builders like David Langford have curated for us for so long, and so well.

UPDATED 3/1/26.

To the science fiction community,

I’m Dr. Phoenix Alexander, the Klein Librarian for Science Fiction and Fantasy here at University of California, Riverside, where I steward the Eaton Collection: one of the world’s largest cataloged collections of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and related genre materials. I’m also a published author of over 20 short stories in venues such as F&SF, Lightspeed, Escape Pod, and The Dark, and serve on SFWA’s History Committee.

I joined UCR Library in 2022, but as you might know, we began digitization of the Jay Kay Klein photographs back in 2017, publishing just under 6,000 images onto a publicly accessible digital repository, Calisphere, as part of a mass digitization pilot initiative. During this pilot initiative, we solicited community feedback on the descriptions of the photos, utilizing a Google form and later a comment function on Calisphere itself. From Fall 2019 to Summer 2021, the UCR Library undertook a comprehensive review project, led by Andrew Lippert, Special Collections Processing Archivist, to update all of the titles and descriptions for the Klein photos on Calisphere, incorporating the voluminous and extraordinarily helpful community feedback received since the initial publication of the photos.

Over the last few years, we’ve continued to digitize the remaining 57,000 images from the Klein collection (an ongoing project that will take many more years to complete, as you can imagine!), but we’re delighted to announce the publication of the first of eleven boxes of photos, comprising almost 2,000 images of 47 conventions and events.

To share hundreds of photos more quickly with the community, we decided to implement a two-phase approach to our descriptions. Some photos from the new box will appear with basic information about the convention or event they belong to, with Klein’s original identifiers for his images as temporary titles. These will be updated later with more details about the people and topics depicted. Other photos will have descriptions already enhanced by myself and Andrew Lippert, both subject specialists (albeit not infallible ones!). We will continue describing and publishing the remainder of the photos, one box at a time, in chronological order.

Once again, we welcome feedback from the community to assist with identifications in the photos. We have compiled a web page with guidance on commenting practices to ensure that your time and labor is respected, and that your feedback will be most helpful to us as we continue to review, add, and amend the descriptions of these images. As science fiction fans and experts, we are of course familiar with the well-known figures of the genre that you’ll see in these collections—so if possible please avoid identifying figures such as Asimov, Heinlein, Pohl, and others of similar notoriety. Your feedback will be most valuable in identifying the lesser-known individuals in the photographs, in particular, fan attendees.

In the Jay Kay Klein photograph collection each individual photo is on its own webpage. Click the photo to open the page. The ‘Item Information’ section has a description containing identifications made on earlier passes. Are you able to add one?  We use Disqus to collect comments giving us identifications. There is a button to ‘JOIN THE DISCUSSION’. Click that button, and existing comments will be displayed with the newest identifications. You will be able to add your own.

We’re honored to be able to make these wonderful snapshots of the SF community publicly accessible in the years to come, and thank you in advance for your patience and generosity! If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at phoenix.alexander@ucr.edu.

Many thanks,

Phoenix & the UCR team

From now until December 31, general registration to our 61st Nebula Awards Conference in Chicago, from June 2-7, 2026, is only $250 USD. Register NOW and save!

We’re happy to announce the return of SFWA’s virtual Book Depot, SFWA’s home at Bookshop.org, the online bookstore that supports physical independent bookstores. Our Bookstore features books by this year’s Nebula finalists and winners. Note: SFWA is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

SFWA President, Jeffe Kennedy interviews the newest Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master, Susan Mary Cooper. This interview took place at the 2024 Nebula Conference. For all of our recorded panels, new live events, writing dates, and SFWA committee meetings, please join the ongoing annual offerings at events.sfwa.org!