How is the Otherwise Award winner chosen?

Each year the Otherwise Award motherboard invites a panel of jurors to read recently published works of science fiction and fantasy that explore and expand gender. At the end of their reading and deliberation, the jurors choose a set of works to honor.

Who recommends works to be considered?

We invite anyone and everyone to recommend works via our recommendations form.

A given year’s jury focuses on works published within that calendar year, but each jury will also consider older works that the previous year’s jury overlooked.

What’s the process?

Here’s an outline of the process and the schedule:

1. Throughout the year, members of the public recommend works. Works can be books, stories, music, video, fanfic, social-media posts, or any other form of speculative fiction.
2. Around June of each year, the Motherboard invites one person to be the jury chair and three to five others to be the rest of the jury (who will each receive a stipend). We also hire a paid coordinator.
3. As works are recommended, the coordinator and the jury chair decide which works to add to the internal “first-stage” list of works for the jurors to consider.
4. The coordinator and chair assign each work on that first-stage list to one juror. We expect that there will be about 50 works on the first-stage list.
5. In mid-November, we close recommendations for that year; recommendations that come in after that can be considered the following year.
6. The jurors each read about 10 to 15 works in the first stage. Each juror chooses no more than 5 of those works to ask the other jurors to read. The result is a second-stage reading list of around 15 to 20 works that all of the jurors will read.
7. In January and February, the jurors read the works on the second-stage reading list that they haven’t previously read. In March, the jurors discuss all the works on that second-stage list.
8. By the end of March, the jurors collectively choose no more than 10 works to honor. They can also add a “long list” of additional works. They write up a brief description of why they selected each of the works on the short/honor list.
9. We announce the list around the end of March. We give an award to the author of each honored work—a cash prize and another item that varies by year, such as chocolate, or a piece of original art.
10. In April or May, we gather the jurors together in a recorded video call, moderated by the jury chair or a staff member, to discuss the year in gender-related sf.
11. Staff members write a text summary of the discussion, or provide a distillation of the discussion in some other form, and we publish that.