Better Late Than Never: The 2025 Hugo Ceremony Apology

It’s been more than two weeks since the pretty disastrous 2025 Hugo ceremony (for all the gory details, see this post) and not only do we finally have the Hugo nomination statistics, we also finally have an apology or rather two.

First of all, there is this apology from Kathy Bond, chair of the 2025 Worldcon in Seattle, Washington. Kathy Bond and her team admit that the organisation of the ceremony was sorely lacking, that pronunciation guides and a script were inadequate and that they left hosts K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl inadequately prepared. It’s kind for Kathy Bond to fall on her sword and take the blame for the mess, but I wouldn’t let the hosts off the hook entirely, because if pronunciation guides, proper scripts, etc… were missing and the general rundown of ceremony was unclear, they should have asked for clarification.

There is also an apology to Kamilah Cole, the Lodestar finalist whom the hosts forgot, when reading out the finalists, as well as to the kh?ré? editorial team (sorry for WordPress refusing to recognise diacritics) for not reading out the names of the whole team without informing them beforehand. The same thing happened to the r/fantasy bingo team in Best Related, who also didn’t have their individual names read out without being informed beforehand, but they are not explicitly mentioned in the apology.

Kathy Bond also notes that they have “carefully documented all of these issues and shared them with LAcon V and Montréal Worldcon 2027 teams”. Which is certainly a good thing, except that none of the issues with the 2025 Hugo ceremony were in any way new. All of these things, mispronounced names, jokes and giggles about names and big teams, captioning failures and forgetting to read out a finalist, have all happened before, sometimes multiple times. In short, Worldcons should know about these pitfalls and issues, yet the same mistakes keep happening again and again.

In the comments at File 770, Erin Underwood also points out that none of the issues with the 2025 Hugo ceremony were in any way new and that we’re dealing with a recurrent infrastructure problem here. The main issue here is that due to the structure of Worldcon, every Worldcon starts from scratch and tries to reinvent the wheel rather than fall back on institutional knowledge and solutions which have already been successfully implemented. One such solution is prerecording the list of the finalists to take pressure off the presenters and only let the presenters announce the winner.

By the way, during the neverending Hugo ceremony from Hell of 2020, Erin Underwood presented the Best Fan Writer category and mispronounced my name. As soon as I pointed this out, Erin Underwood promptly apologised to me and also asked how to properly pronounce it. As I’ve said before, I could spell my full name in two language by the time I was five, I’m used to having my name mispronounced and respond to anything that even vaguely resembles my name. However, I still appreciate when people take the care to get it right or apologise when they get it wrong.

Finally, there is this suggestion:

Recommended creation of a new sub-area role in the Worldcon organizational structure responsible solely for the accurate handling of names. While not as visible as the errors at the podium, we also encountered technical issues with our badge printing software that were not identified until too late that failed to print diacritical marks on names correctly. We believe that centralizing this responsibility will help future Worldcons be more inclusive and respectful to individuals in all areas of the convention including the Hugo Awards.

Now this is a good suggestion that future Worldcons will hopefully implement. As for the badge printing software, I’m sadly not surprised that this happened. Because particularly US based software often has issues with diacritics and special characters. Note that I apologised above for WordPress not recognising diacritics and thus mangling kh?ré?. Because this is a known issue with WordPress and one they refuse to address. See this post from 2019 remembering Czech director Václav Vorlí?ek. That post – a tribute to a beloved director of genre films and TV, who is little known in the English speaking world – near killed me, because WordPress kept stripping out the handcoded diacritics.

But it’s not just WordPress. I’ve heard from people who had problems going through security at the airport, because the name on the ticket did not match the name on the passport. However, airline reservation software often doesn’t recognise special characters, so the people were forced to use workarounds, which then didn’t match their passports. I know one person who actually changed their legal name to get rid of the special character ß in their name, because they had a job which required a lot of travelling and kept running into problems with airport security.

So in short, I’m surprised that there were problems with the badge printing software. Nonetheless, these problems shouldn’t happen in the year 2025. Software developers should finally realise that English is not the default and that diacritics and special characters exist and that names don’t always fit neatly into a first name, middle name (Germans don’t have middle names – we can have multiple first names and multipart surnames, but no middle names) and surname pattern, that sometimes titles are part of a name, that patronymics exist, that transliteration can result in different spellings, that sometimes a rude word can be part of a name, etc… Also see this great post by Patrick McKenzie about falsehoods programmers believe about names, which someone linked in the comments about the apology.

Also, with regard to diacritics, it’s not okay to just leave them out, because diacritics affect the pronunciation and can also change the meaning. A German person named Käthe Müller would not be happy to find herself spelled Kathe Muller, because that’s not her name. The way her name would be spelled in systems that cannot handle Unlaute is Kaethe Mueller BTW.

Finally, regarding the pitfalls of names, I’d like to share a funny true story. Some forty years ago, there was a prominent German politician named Otto Graf Lambsdorff. That wasn’t even his full name, just the shortened version. His full name was Otto Friedrich Wilhelm von der Wenge Graf Lambsdorff. Hereby, Otto is the first name, Graf is his title, since he was from an aristocratic family, and Lambsdorff is his surname. In English, his name would be Otto Count Lambsdorff.

Otto Graf Lambsdorff was West Germany’s secretary of the economy from 1977 to 1984 and in this capacity he visited Singapore sometime in 1982/83. The Singapore Straits Times reported about this visit – with the headline “Otto visits Singapore”, which was an absolute howler for German speakers, because Otto was the stage name used by popular comedian Otto Waalkes. Indeed, I remember seeing that headline as a kid and saying to my parents, “Wow, I had no idea that Otto was famous even here. Though I wonder how his humour will translate.”

It’s easy to see how that mistake happened. Someone at the Straits Times saw a foreign name with three parts and assumed it followed the Chinese naming pattern where the surname is listed first. Or maybe some software programmed for Chinese names messed up. The correct headline would have been “Graf Lambsdorff visits Singapore” or – if you’re opposed to aristocratic titles – “Lambsdorff visits Singapore”. Note that the nephew of Otto Graf Lambsdorff, who’s also a politician as well as the German ambassador in Moscow, simply uses Alexander Lambsdorff as his screenname on Twitter, ditching the title.

As for why it took more than two weeks for an apology to be posted, Kathy Bond notes that several members of her team fell ill. I have no reason to disbelieve this, since I’ve heard from several people that they caught covid or other varieties of con crud at Worldcon. However, a brief note along the lines of “Yes, we’re aware of the issues with the Hugo ceremony and we will address them, but many of us are currently ill, so please give us time” should have been posted before.

That brings me to the second apology by hosts K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl, which may be found here as well as at File 770, if you don’t want to deal with Google Docs.

The apology by the hosts once again points at institutional issues behind the scenes that pronunciation guides weren’t provided for all names and none of the titles, that the script they were given wasn’t adequate, that there was no full rehearsal due to scheduling and technical issues and that there were last minute changes made to the ceremony (which was also confirmed by Seanan McGuire who presented a different category than initially planned with very short notice).

ETA: I checked with our editor Gideon whether he gave Seattle the pronunciations of every Galactic Journey team member listed as a Hugo finalist, since my name and Kris Vyas-Myall’s were mispronounced and I’m not sure if they got Natalie Devitt’s right, and according to Gideon, he was never asked for the pronunciations of the names of team members. So the con definitely didn’t have the pronunciations of our names (unless someone had the pronunciation of my name from a previous nomination).

However, even if the con failed to provide pronunciation guides for names and titles, the hosts could still have requested this information from the con or even contacted the people in question directly. When John Picacio hosted the Hugo ceremony a few years ago, he personally asked all the finalists how to pronounce their names to get it right. K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl could have done the same. And a full rehearsal of the Hugo ceremony should be a scheduling priority. The hosts should also have insisted on a full rehearsal.

There are specific apologies to Kamilah Cole for forgetting her, when reading out the Lodestar finalists, to Darcie Little Badger for mispronouncing the title of her Lodestar winning novel Sheine Lende and to the kh?ré? editorial team for not reading out the full list of names. Once again, there is no mention of the r/Fantasy bingo team, even though they were also neither informed nor happy about not having their names read out.

Then there is the issue of giggling at some of the names, which K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl claim they can’t remember doing, but that they would never giggle at someone’s name. Now I don’t doubt that they can’t remember the giggling, but it definitely happened and can be clearly heard on the recording of the ceremony. Grigory Lukin links to one instance in the comments at File 770.  The affected person is Egbiameje Omole, poetry editor at FIYAH. Now the giggle may well have been due to nerves or something the audience wasn’t aware of (like the infamous laugh during a memorial ceremony for flood victims that cost Armin Laschet the chancellorship) and not necessarily directed at Egbiameje Omole, since I don’t believe that K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl of all people would giggle at a Nigerian name. But it definitely happened, whether K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl remember it or not, and Egbiameje Omole deserves an apology, too.

Finally, K. Tempest Bradford and Nisi Shawl point out that they didn’t have any experience hosting an awards ceremony and therefore didn’t know what to ask of the organisation team.

This last bit is part of the problem, namely that Hugo toastmasters are usually popular and well regarded writers or other members of the SFF community. However, just because someone is a well known writer doesn’t mean they’re necessarily a good Hugo ceremony host. This was part of the problem with George R.R. Martin in 2020, for while George R.R. Martin may be one of the best known writers on the planet and does come across as likeable in TV interviews and the like, he’s not actually a very good Hugo ceremony presenter and also has known issues with pronouncing unfamiliar names and words.

What you want for a Hugo ceremony or indeed any awards ceremony is someone with stage experience who is spontaneous, can respond to unexpected issues and who can also handle unfamiliar words and names. And we do have people who fit this description in our community, even if they may not be the biggest names. But I’d rather have someone on stage who does a good job and knows what they’re doing rather than a big name writer who stumbles through the ceremony.

On the weekend after Worldcon I was at another con, Toyplosion in Castrop-Rauxel. Now Toyplosion is a very different con than Worldcon. It’s a vintage toy convention where the dealers room is not an afterthought but the main attraction. They don’t have an awards show or a masquerade or anything like that. However, Toyplosion also had stage programming such as interviews and a live podcast recording. There was also a tombola where the winners were announced live on stage and handed their prizes. And for the tombola winner announcement, the Toyplosion organisers drafted a YouTuber with local TV experience and an actress/singer/TV presenter who also happens to be a fan. Because these two people both have stage experience, are charming and managed to make even something fairly dull such as reading out winning tombola numbers entertaining. I wouldn’t necessarily choose these two people to host a Hugo ceremony, especially since the YouTuber has notable pronunciation issues with English language words and names (because not everybody is good at everything). Nonetheless, Toyplosion, a newish con which doesn’t have big ceremonies, handled the one they have better than Worldcon did.

ETA 09-06-2025: On BlueSky, Mary Robinette Kowal discusses how the 2025 Dragon Awards handled their ceremony and particularly how host Robert Picardo (you may remember him as the emergency medical hologram from Star Trek Voyager) handled names where he was not sure of the pronuciation.

Given the track record of the Dragons, it’s telling if they manage to do something better than the Hugos.

I don’t think that the many issues with the 2025 Hugo ceremony were due to malice and I never did. The main issue here is carelessness on the part of both the hosts and the organising team. And the fact that everybody involved should have known better, since we’ve dealt these very same issues before, makes this carelessness even more aggravating, since none of this needed to happen.