The results are in! British-Nigerian author Tade Thompson and Tanzanian-Australian writer Eugen Bacon are among the winners of the 2026 British Science Fiction Association Awards, announced on 5 April at Eastercon’s Iridescence convention in Birmingham. Thompson won Best Shorter Fiction for The Apologists, published in Clarkesworld in November 2025, while Bacon took home Best Non-Fiction (Short) for her essay Spec Fic and the Politics of Identity: Finding the Self, published in Strange Horizons.

We have been following this awards cycle closely. When the longlist was announced in January, we reported that African writers had secured 30 nominations across seven categories, the most significant showing the continent has had at the BSFA in recent memory. When the shortlist was announced in March, five African authors had survived the cut, with Thompson and Wole Talabi going head-to-head in the Best Shorter Fiction category, two Nigerians competing in the same slot, while Bacon, Ghanaian author Cheryl S. Ntumy for Black Friday, and Zimbabwe’s T.L. Huchu for Secrets of the First School filled out the rest of the African shortlist representation.

Thompson’s win will come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. He is one of the most decorated African speculative fiction writers today, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2019 for Rosewater, the first novel in his Wormwood Trilogy, and a writer who has spent years making the case, in both his fiction and his criticism, that African science fiction does not “rise”, it is simply here, doing the work. The Apologists continues that track record. Bacon’s win, meanwhile, is the latest chapter in a remarkable run of recognition for a writer who, as we noted when covering her double Foreword INDIES nomination last month, has built one of the most formidable presences in African speculative fiction across both fiction and critical work. Her essay, which interrogates how speculative fiction engages with questions of identity and selfhood from an African lens, earned its prize.

The BSFA Awards have been presented annually since 1970. That African writers are not just appearing on longlists but taking home prizes is a shift worth marking because the infrastructure of recognition is finally catching up to the work that has been there all along.