SFWA Names N. K. Jemisin as 42nd Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master
For Immediate Release
On November 16, 2025, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) was proud to announce the latest recipient of its Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award: N. K. Jemisin. Two other SFWA Grand Masters, Lois McMaster Bujold and Nicola Griffith, joined in a keynote presentation ahead of the announcement, which took place at SFWA’s first-ever Quasar conference: a fall online Nebula event.
The SFWA Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award recognizes “lifetime achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy.” It is named after author Damon Knight, SFWA’s founder and the organization’s 13th Grand Master. Initially, the Grand Master wasn’t given out every year, but from 1975 to 2025 much has changed in our field, including the consistency with which we award this prestigious post.
This year, our Grand Master enters a role previously held by Peter S. Beagle, Connie Willis, Nalo Hopkinson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Anne McCaffrey, Robin McKinley, Joe Haldeman, and other legends of genre fiction who have been granted this title.
N. K. Jemisin is a fantasy author and 2020 MacArthur Fellow whose fiction has been recognized with multiple Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. Most of her works have been optioned for television or film, and collectively her novels, including the Broken Earth trilogy, have sold over two million copies. Her speculative works range widely in theme, though with repeated motifs: resistance and oppression, loneliness and belonging, and Wouldn’t It Be Cool If This One Ridiculous Thing Happened.
As SFWA President Kate Ristau noted:
It is my joy and honor to celebrate NK Jemisin as our newest SFWA Grand Master. I cannot imagine a better Grand Master to solidify our next 60 years at SFWA.
At panels and conventions, craft talks and workshops, NK’s name already stands beside masters of fantasy like Tolkien and Le Guin. Her skill in world-building shifted the way many of us view setting. She truly brings her worlds to life. In Jemisin’s work, setting is a construct and a character that creates tension, influences character, and compels the plots forward. To put it simply, she is a master of the craft.
As a younger writer, I turned pages and felt the ground tremble beneath me in the Broken Earth Trilogy. As New York came to life in the Great Cities Series, I took a closer look at my own hometown—how we create, legislate, and imagine borders, and how the worlds we imagine could come to life beneath our feet.
We don’t write in a vacuum. We write in a world of complexity and trauma. Jemisin helps us hold a mirror up to our darkest fears and our deepest desires. We want to live in a better world, but if we don’t, what stories will we tell? How will we confront history and our possible futures with authenticity and possibility? Jemisin shows us that storytelling is not just an escape—it’s a powerful tool for engagement in our own reality. Through her work, she reminds us that speculative fiction can be both a space for resistance and a landscape for transformation.
I am proud to honor Jemisin for her invaluable contributions to the current state and the future life of speculative fiction. She is helping us build better worlds, imagine different futures, and fight for the world we want to live in right now.
Lois McMaster Bujold, SFWA’s 36th Grand Master, reflected on the role of this award in her work:
I did not altogether understand where the SFWA Grandmaster honor came from until I’d received one myself, and studied up, by which I identified it as “Oh, this is a career award.” If the meaning of any literary award is ultimately created by the works that have won it, looking at the list of my fellow Grand Masters put me in some very meaningful company indeed. It was enormously gratifying to be the recipient of 2020’s Damon Knight Grand Master Award, and it did feel like the culmination of a very long journey; no further ambition need apply.
Which put me, oddly, back where I’d started, with just me, my stories, and their readers. All the noisy brouhaha of marketing competition and promotion and publisher’s editorial needs dropping (thanks be) away, all the aspects of a career that were not writing becoming optional.
Our 41st Grand Master, Nicola Griffith, commented on how the work goes on after the award:
“The tagline of my first novel was Change or die. I believe that applies to art and life, and unless we want our work to stiffen, slow, and stop we ourselves must keep changing and growing.
The last sentence of my most recent short story is ‘She has arrived.’ She’s made a galaxy-spanning journey through time, space, and realities—astonishing, miraculous—an impossible achievement. But the achievement—the arrival, the triumph, the award—isn’t the point. It’s a marvel, an honour and a touchstone, but at heart it’s part of the continual journey.”
SFWA Executive Director Isis Asare is also delighted to welcome Jemisin into the accolade:
Jemisin’s 2018 Hugo Award acceptance speech starts with the words “It’s been a hard year, hasn’t it.” Those words feel profoundly relevant today. The writer continues on to say that she wrote the Broken Earth Trilogy to speak to the struggle and what it takes to live and thrive in a world that seems determined to break you. And what gets us through is family—blood and chosen—and community. That is the reason SFWA exists. Jemisin, and her masterful writing, reminds all of us that “the stars are ours”.
SFWA is now officially on the road to Chicago, which will be home to SFWA’s 61st Nebula Awards Conference in June 2026. Early bird pricing rises on January 1, 2026, but for now, would-be attendees can purchase regular weekend programming for $250 USD.
We hope to see you out next year at the Nebulas, to celebrate our latest Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master N. K. Jemisin and a whole host of other dynamic voices in science fiction, fantasy, and related genres.