Leaked emails show organizers of the prestigious Hugo Awards vetted writers’ work and comments with regard to China, where last year’s awards were held.

Leaked emails show organizers of the prestigious Hugo Awards vetted writers’ work and comments with regard to China, where last year’s awards were held.

Organizers of the Hugo Awards, one of the most prominent literary awards in science fiction, excluded multiple authors from shortlists last year over concerns their work or public comments could be offensive to China, leaked emails show.

Questions had been raised as to why writers including Neil Gaiman, R.F. Kuang, Xiran Jay Zhao and Paul Weimer had been deemed ineligible as finalists despite earning enough votes according to information published last month by awards organizers. Emails released this week revealed that they were concerned about how some authors might be perceived in China, where the Hugo Awards were held last year for the first time.

  • Wrrzag
    415·
    9 months ago

    China didn’t have anything to do with it. They censored books that were already translated and selling in china, and Chinese authors.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
      75·
      9 months ago

      China = Censorship.

      It’s impossible to believe that a pro-China author might have been censored at a western organized and operated media event. There’s no way that a wildly popular domestically written and published and Galaxy Award winning sci-fi novel “We Live In Nanjing” got left off the list because it was too pro-China!

      No. If novels and authors were excluded from the list - if R. F. Kuang and Jiang Bo didn’t make the list - it must be due to the villainous Chinese censors doing Evil China Stuff, and not a bunch of elderly Euro-Americans felt like trimming the pool back to an almost exclusively western and white author pool.