Congratulations! Bogi Takács is the first Hungarian who won the Hugo award!

Many regard the prize as the Academy Award of science fiction. The World Science Fiction Society decides about the winners of the award each year which received its name after Hugo Gernsback, founder of the Amazing Stories, a science fiction magazine.

According to index.hu, the Hugo and Nebula awards are the two most popular and well-known acknowledgements in the science fiction society. It was in 1953 that the World Science Fiction Society distributed it for the first time and, except for 1954, that has happened even since wielding the name Hugo from 1993 on. 

Never before did a Hungarian author receive the award. Before, Lisa Goldstein, a writer of Hungarian origins, was very close to it in 1988, but she did not win the novel category then. Bogi Takács seems to be the ice breaker in this respect since she won the fan writer category last Friday. That was not her first nomination, since in 2018 and 2019 she was already in the competition.

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In a 2018 interview for Azonnali she said about herself that

she is a Hungarian, Jewish, agender and transgender person.

She already published novels before in foreign sci-fi magazines like Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld or Lightspeed. Furthermore, she has been editing the Transcendent anthology series collecting transgender sci-fi novels since 2017.

She said in her interview that there is a current trend in American literature to emphasise minority writers. However, that is not too easy, since the media likes majority writers talking about the minorities instead. They report about minority writers only if they talk about how difficult it is to belong to a minority community – she added then.

She cleared that minority authors should write about everything, even about how it feels to belong to their minorities.

She told that Hungarian society is not too friendly to transgender people.

About the award, she said to Index that she received it for her activities as a person who always talks and writes about books (her website’s name is Bogi Reads The World). She got 284 votes while Cora Buhler, who finished in the second place, only 263. 

Source: index.hu