N. K. Jemisin’s Short Story Emergency Skin Wins 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novelette

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--(NASDAQ: AMZN)—Tonight, New York Times bestselling author N. K. Jemisin’s short story Emergency Skin was named the winner of the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Short Novelette. Published last fall as part of the Forward collection from Amazon Original Stories, Emergency Skin is Jemisin’s first publication with the Amazon Publishing imprint.

“I'm astonished and delighted that people like my little stranger-in-a-strange-land parable,” said Jemisin. “Many thanks to the Hugo voters, and to Amazon for making the story available at low cost or free so that readers everywhere can enjoy it.”

“The Hugo Awards recognize the very best in the science fiction genre, and we are so pleased to celebrate this recognition of N.K. Jemisin’s boundary-pushing short story, Emergency Skin,” said Mikyla Bruder, Publisher of Amazon Publishing. “Time and again, N. K. Jemisin proves why she is one of today’s most important voices in the genre, and we are thrilled that the Hugo Awards agree that this story is no different.”

In Jemisin’s Emergency Skin, narrated by Star Trek: Discovery’s Jason Isaacs, an explorer returns to gather information from a climate-ravaged Earth that his ancestors, and others among the planet’s finest, fled centuries ago. But the mission comes with a warning: a graveyard world awaits him, along with those who were left behind.

This is the fourth Hugo Award win for Jemisin, whose novels The Fifth Season (2016), The Obelisk Gate (2017), and The Stone Sky (2018), all published within The Broken Earth trilogy by Orbit, won for Best Novel. Jemisin is the first Black writer to win in the Best Novel category, and the first author ever to win for all three books in a trilogy. The 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novelette nominees also included Caroline M. Yoahchim’s The Archnology of Love; Sarah Gailey’s Away With the Wolves; Sarah Pinsker’s The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye; Siobhan Carroll’s For He Can Creep; and Ted Chiang’s Omphalos.

Amazon Original Stories offers single-sitting, bingeable reads as e-book and audio downloads, available for free with a Prime or Kindle Unlimited subscription. Emergency Skin was acquired and edited by Kjersti Egerdahl, Amazon Original Stories Senior Editor, for the Forward collection, which also includes stories from Andy Weir (Randomize), Blake Crouch (Summer Frost), Veronica Roth (Ark), Amor Towles (You Have Arrived at Your Destination), and Paul Tremblay (The Last Conversation). This fall, Amazon Original Stories will publishing Mindy Kaling’s latest collection of essays, all told with her signature warmth and wit. All Amazon Original Stories collections are available free to Prime members, as well as Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

www.amazon.com/ForwardCollection

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