We need your recommendations of works for the Otherwise Award jurors to consider. If you’ve read a recently published work of science fiction or fantasy that explores or expands our understanding of gender, please tell us about it by filling out the recommendation form below. If you have more than one, fill out the form again for each recommendation.
(Works can be books, stories, poems, music, video, fanfic, social media posts, or any other form of speculative fiction.)
Please only recommend works that were published in 2025 or 2026. (For works published in 2025, check to make sure they weren’t on the 2025 recommendations list.)
In the form below, anything that you enter in the Author, Title, Publisher, Link, and Additional Comments fields will be publicly visible. If you want to add non-public comments about the work that you’re recommending, email recommendations@otherwiseaward.org.
The Additional Comments field is optional, but we strongly recommend saying something in that field about the ways in which the work explores or expands gender—doing so helps the jury as well as anyone who’s using this page as a reading list.
Because anyone can recommend a work, a work’s presence on this list doesn’t indicate recognition by the Otherwise Awards, so please don’t use a work’s presence on this list to promote the work. (If a work wins an Award or appears on an Honor List, you can use that to promote the work.)
Recommendations for this year’s Awards close in late 2026. (Recommendations after that will go to the 2027 award.) The 2026 awards will be given in 2027, location to be determined.
To let us know something related to recommendations that doesn’t fit in the form, email recommendations@otherwiseaward.org.
The 2026 Otherwise Awards Recommendations
| Author | Title | Publisher | Comments | Sub Date | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Koji A. Dae | Casual | Tenebrous Press | Casual is a near future science fiction book that explores the intersection of pregnancy and technology. Valya grew up in a world where her body was not her own, and her pregnancy brings to light the ways people lay claim to the minds and bodies of women, forcing her to decide what she wants for her unborn daughter. store.tenebrouspress.com/products/casual… | 2025-12-02 22:25:30 | |
| Rose Michael | Else | Spineless Wonders | 'Else' is a 'climate fiction' novel primarily concerned with a mother–daughter relationship in a not-too-distant future, on a flood and fire ravaged continent. The protagonists' conversation is poetic, punning, alliterative, and atypical: they exchange animal facts 'like a frontier trade'. Leisl has ambivalent feelings about parenting her neurodivergent pre-teen, which 'Else' expands across generations: every character from their 200 years of family history is in some way not biologically related to the family that raises them. The book also explores non-binary ideas, in its before-and-after structure, which swaps points of view, and the figure of 'Yu', a gender-fluid surfer they meet in the afterwards who represents an alternative to the assumptions they are running from. shortaustralianstories.com.au/product/el… | 2025-11-29 20:05:11 | |
| Stacy Nathaniel Jackson | The Ephemera Collector: a Novel | Liveright | In the Diwata Collection, a story within a story presented as an archive, Azwan Adisa is "both/and", a border patroller of the underwater city-state of Diwata in Monterey Canyon. Despite her ambiguous anatomy, she is unashamed, unafraid, and undeterred. The trope of intersex individuals, or for that matter, lack of visibility in literature is dismissed as well as camouflaged; in other words not the point which is an expansion of gender "norms" in and of itself. amazon.com/ephemera-collector-stacy-nath… | 2025-11-18 13:10:53 |