The Locus Awards, one of the most respected prizes in science fiction and fantasy publishing, added a Translated Novel category for the first time in 2026, and Korean authors immediately made themselves impossible to ignore. Of the ten finalists named for the inaugural category, four are Korean works translated into English, a striking showing for a single national literature in a brand-new award category.
Founded in 1971 by Locus magazine founder Charles N. Brown, the Locus Awards are voted on by the public and sit alongside the Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick awards as among the most closely watched honors in the genre. The new Translated Novel category was created to recognize the growing volume of international speculative fiction reaching English-language readers, and Korean publishing wasted no time claiming a foothold.
Two of the four Korean finalists come from Bora Chung, the acclaimed author previously shortlisted for the International Booker Prize for “Cursed Bunny.” Her finalist works are “Red Sword,” a science-fiction reimagining of the historical Joseon dispatch of musketeers to fight for the Qing dynasty against Russia in the 1600s, reworked here as an interstellar war involving colonized prisoners on a barren planet, and “The Midnight Timetable,” a story collection blending eerie, ghost-story atmospherics with dry institutional dread, centered on night-shift workers at a research facility that stores mysterious objects.
Also shortlisted is Chun Sun-ran’s “The Midnight Shift,” a vampire romance following three lonely women, including one adoptee living as a perpetual outsider abroad, whose lives are upended when a vampire who can sense loneliness finds them. Rounding out the Korean finalists is Kim Seong-il’s “Blood for the Undying Throne,” an epic built around a magical technology called the “magic engine” that has concentrated enormous wealth and power in an empire, and the three protagonists fighting to bring it down.
Notably, the article accompanying the announcement points out that while Korean-American author Yoon Ha Lee has won a Locus Award before, this marks the first time a Korean-language science fiction novel translated into English has reached finalist status. Winners will be announced May 30, giving international readers a few more weeks to catch up on some of the buzziest Korean genre fiction of the year before the results are in.
Source: Oh Gi-ppeum, Vogue Korea, April 15, 2026.
