Hugo Award
The World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) gives out the Hugo Awards each year for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year. The award is named after Hugo Gernsback, who founded the pioneering science fiction magazine "Amazing Stories" and who is considered one of the "fathers" of the science fiction genre. Works are eligible for an award if they were published in the prior calendar year, or translated into English in the prior calendar year. There are no written rules as to which works qualify as science fiction or fantasy, and the decision of eligibility in that regard is left up to the voters, rather than to the organizing committee. Hugo Award nominees and winners are chosen by supporting or attending members of the annual World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon, and the presentation evening constitutes its central event. The selection process is defined in the WSFS constitution as instant-runoff voting with five nominees per category, except in the case of a tie. The awards are split over more than a dozen categories, and include both written and dramatic works.
World Fantasy Award
The awards have been described by book critics such as "The Guardian" as a "prestigious fantasy prize", and one of the three most prestigious speculative fiction awards, along with the Hugo and Nebula Awards (which cover both fantasy and science fiction). In 2010 multiple winner George R. R. Martin described winning the Hugo, Nebula, and "the prestigious World Fantasy Award" as the "triple crown". Others have also noted the award's prestige in the field, such as Tachyon Publications and 2014 Best Anthology winner Gardner Dozois. Stephen Jones of the "Best New Horror" series has said that winning the anthology award for their first volume in 1991 helped "establish the series among readers and some publishers" in multiple countries. Winners such as Nnedi Okorafor—Best Novel in 2011—have described the award as "one of my greatest honors as a writer". Editor and bookseller Rick Klaw in 2007, however, noted that the consensus at the time "in the bookselling community" was that winning the novel category did not have any effect on sales and did not help keep the book in print, with 57 percent of prior winners out of print, compared to 23 percent of Hugo Award winners from the same time period.