Best Professional Artist Hugo: Eligible Works from 2019

By JJ: To assist Hugo nominators, this post provides information on the artists and designers of more than 660 works which appeared in a professional publication in the field of science fiction or fantasy for the first time in 2019.

These credits have been accumulated over the course of the year from dust jackets, Acknowledgments sections and copyright pages in works, as well as other sources on the internet. This year, Filer Goobergunch also collected this information, and though we had a lot of overlap, his extra entries have greatly increasead the information we are able to provide you. My profound thanks go to Goobergunch for all of his hard work.

You can see the full combined spreadsheet of Editor and Artist credits here (I will be continuing to update this as I get more information).

In this post I will display up to 8 images of artworks for each artist for whom I have identified 3 or more works which appeared in a professional publication in the field of science fiction or fantasy for the first time in 2019.

Please note carefully the eligibility criteria according to the WSFS Constitution:


Professional Artist

3.3.12: Best Professional Artist. An illustrator whose work has appeared in a professional publication in the field of science fiction or fantasy during the previous calendar year.

3.2.11: A Professional Publication is one which meets at least one of the following two criteria:
(1) it provided at least a quarter the income of any one person or,
(2) was owned or published by any entity which provided at least a quarter the income of any of its staff and/or owner.

3.10.2: In the Best Professional Artist category, the acceptance should include citations of at least three (3) works first published in the eligible year.


Under the current rules, artwork for semiprozines and fanzines is not eligible in this category. You can check whether a publication is a prozine or a semiprozine in this directory (the semiprozine list is at the top of the page, and the prozine directory is at the bottom).

Please be sure to check the spreadsheet first; but then, if you are able to confirm credits missing 2019-original works and the names of their artists from Acknowledgments sections, copyright pages, or by contacting authors and/or artists, go ahead and add them in comments, and I will get them included in the spreadsheet, and if the artist is credited with at least 4 works, in this post. If you have questions or corrections, please add those also. Please note that works may or may not be added to the list at my discretion.

PLEASE DON’T ADD GUESSES.

Artists, Authors, Editors and Publishers are welcome to post in comments here, or to send their lists to jjfile770 [at] gmail [dot] com.


(warning: this post is heavily image-intensive, and will probably not work well on mobile devices: flee now, or prepare to meet your doom extremely slow page download)


The following works have been confirmed, to the best of my ability, as having appeared in a professional publication in the field of science fiction or fantasy for the first time in 2019. Clicking on the thumbnail will display a larger version; where possible, the larger version will be the original artwork before cropping and the addition of titles.


Katie Anderson


Richard Anderson


Tommy Arnold


Adam Auerbach


Ben Baldwin


Alejandro Colucci


Owen Corrigan


Francesca Corsini


David Curtis


Galen Dara


Dan Dos Santos


Adam Doyle


Bob Eggleton


Micah Epstein


Donato Giancola


Lee Gibbons


Lars Grant-West


Arthur Haas


Mary Haasdyk


Amy Halperin


Dominic Harman


Peter Hollinghurst


Robert Hunt


Jaime Jones


Duncan Kay


Tom Kidd


Jody A. Lee


Julia Lloyd


Todd Lockwood


Jeffrey Alan Love


Tithi Luadthong (aka grandfailure)


Gregory Manchess


Stephan Martinière


Tony Mauro


Chris McGrath


Kurt Miller


Erik Mohr


Gene Mollica


Victor Mosquera


Cliff Nielsen


John Picacio


Lauren Panepinto


Lisa Marie Pompilio


Larry Rostant


Dave Seeley


Gemma Sheldrake


Chris Sickels, Red Nose Studio


Marc Simonetti


Mark Smith


Will Staehle


Sam Weber


Alyssa Winans


Stephen Youll


Paul Young


Damon Za


21 thoughts on “Best Professional Artist Hugo: Eligible Works from 2019

  1. The name of Stephan Martinière is misspelled (Martinere, missing an “i”) in the heading for the samples of his work (although the tag at the end is correct).

  2. JJ FYI the “here” link to your full combined spreadsheet is not currently working, for me at least. I tried it a few times. The other two links are working just fine.

    “You can see the full combined spreadsheet of Editor and Artist credits here”

  3. Thanks, Sean. WordPress likes to try to format things for you, and it will not infrequently muck something up. The link has been fixed.

  4. The covers by Peter Hollinghurst and Duncan Kay look like they are a single painting that was split into multiple covers.

  5. Thanks to JJ and Goobergunch!

    I emailed Penguin Random House customer service to find out who the cover artist was for War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi. They replied that it was Nekro.

    (I haven’t read it yet, but that cover practically made the book leap off the bookstore shelf for me.)

  6. Rich Lynch: The covers by Peter Hollinghurst and Duncan Kay look like they are a single painting that was split into multiple covers.

    They are, Rich. If you click on the images, you can see a larger version — without the cover titles, when I could find it. This is something that Newcon Press has been doing for a few years now — releasing novellas in quartets with covers from a unified painting.

    The 2018 offerings by Ben Baldwin (with titleswithout titles) and Jim Burns (with titleswithout titles) were especially spectacular.

  7. Thanks so much, JJ and Goobergunch! I have one slot open on my ballot and it’s going to be hard to choose. There’s so much great stuff!

  8. Thanks for the Murakami and Nekro credits, Laura, they’ve been added to the spreadsheet.

  9. I noticed Made Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky on your spreadsheet. Red Nose Studio/Chris Sickels also did the cover for Precious Little Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky, Tor.com, Nov 2019; “For He Can Creep” by Siobhan Carroll, Tor.com, July 2019; and Maximillian Fly by Angie Sage, Katherine Tegen Books, June 2019.

    I’ve gleaned this information from the artist’s website and blog.

  10. Laura: Isn’t this cover of How Long ’til Black Future Month? the same as the original 2018 release?

    Yes, it is. Thanks for the catch.

  11. Lorien Gray: I noticed Made Things by Adrian Tchaikovsky on your spreadsheet. Red Nose Studio/Chris Sickels also did the cover for…

    Laura: Gregory Manchess illustrated two 2019 Mongolian Wizard stories by Michael Swanwick at Tor.com

    Thanks for looking these up. I’ve got all of the Tor.com Originals art credits in the spreadsheet now.

  12. Galleries have been added for the following artists:

    Donato Giancola
    Mary Haasdyk
    Jody A. Lee
    Tithi Luadthong (aka grandfailure)
    Gregory Manchess
    John Picacio
    Chris Sickels, Red Nose Studios
    Mark Simonetti
    Sam Weber
    Alyssa Winans

  13. Galleries have been added for the following artists:

    David Curtis
    Adam Doyle
    Lee Gibbons
    Lars Grant-West
    Arthur Haas
    Dominic Harman
    Robert Hunt
    Todd Lockwood
    Jeffrey Alan Love
    Victor Mosquera
    Gemma Sheldrake
    Mark Smith
    Paul Young
    Damon Za

Comments are closed.