She Nebula-Awarded

how did this happen?

Author

A.D. Sui
June 08, 2025

Okay, so now that my brain has remembered how words string together, here are some thoughts. First, I want to congratulate all the winners. It’s an immense honor to share this moment with you. You are all so deserving! I also want to thank everyone who participated in making the Nebulas happen, the volunteers, the attendees, SFWA, and everyone watching from home. None of this happens without you.

When I say this is a dream of more than twenty years in the making, I’m not exaggerating. One of my first real chapter books was Podkayne of Mars by Robert A. Heinlein (it was in a Russian translation, but whatever). I was taught to read on science fiction. My understanding of language and life cannot be teased apart from the three-act narrative structure.

Back in Kharkiv, we lived in a bachelor apartment, concrete walls, carpets to cover the concrete. A row of bookshelves separated where my parents slept and my own little “room”. The books were stacked on my side so I could read the spines as I fell asleep. I first learned how to pronounce English names before I ever learned English. Harrison. Heinlein. Simak. Norton. Bradbury. I first learned the imaginary worlds of these works before I ever understood my place in this one.

Writing my own fiction, though, was a pipedream. You had to be an English writer to write science fiction. We had our own writers, of course, but if you wanted to be big, to be nominated for the big awards, you had to write in English.

Then came immigration—my chance. I learned English the same way I learned Russian, and then Ukrainian; through stories. I remember spending hours translating The Way to Amalthea by the Strugatsky brothers into English because I had already read the work in Russian and “knew”, to some extent, how it was supposed to sound. I used a paperback dictionary as an aid. My translation sucked. I was eleven. Give me a break.

Even as I grew to understand English, the writing dream was no closer. Immigrants didn’t become sci-fi writers. We got jobs, real jobs that paid the bills. We got degrees. STEM degrees. Science degrees. Those earned money. Writing was reserved for the kids whose parents had connections, and anyway, I missed most of the North American sci-fi zeitgeist. I would never catch up. So, I did the right thing. I studied. I got the degrees. Meanwhile, I wrote A LOT of fanfiction (you will never find it, trust me, don’t try, I mean it).

And then in 2021/2022 something just snapped? I was in my 30s now. My skin was thicker. I cared way less about how I would disappoint my parents. I started to write. I started submitting short stories. I started to really try. The rest, you already know.

Dragonfly is the seed that was planted when I was a child, reading the last names of some very successful sci-fi authors, thinking I will never share a shelf with them. It’s the book I needed when I was a teenager, but didn’t have the language to write. It’s the book that I wrote for myself, a book about devouring rage, about the refusal to surrender. Somehow, it went on to resonate with so many people. It’s the book that opened up the wonderful writing community to me and simultaneously reminded me of my roots.

It’s not a perfect book.

It was never meant to be.

It’s the book I want to show my eleven-year-old self (only show, it’s too graphic for eleven-year-olds to read) and tell her that we’ll still be accepted, even with our strangeness and our anger. Here’s the book. This is proof. Keep going.

I was raised on stories, and so I know that every ending must also serve as a narrative beginning. It’s what makes for a satisfying tale. A girl dreaming of being a sci-fi writer wins a Nebula. A girl who grew up on Saltovka becomes the first Ukrainian author to have the honor (please fact-check me on this). But every ending must serve as another beginning, and I’ve got many more stories to tell.

Onwards, friends.

Some Ukrainian works for you to check out:

The Factory by Ihor Mysiak (translated by Evheniia Dubrova and Hanna Leliv)