The 2025 Hugo Awards: THE TAINTED CUP Wins Best Novel
Recently, The 2025 Hugo Awards winners were announced at a ceremony at Seattle Worldcon 2025. THE TAINTED CUP by Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey) brought home best novel!
The Hugo Awards are considered to be among the most prestigious awards for the science fiction and fantasy genres, which recognize media, literature, editors, artists, and fan activities. View The 2025 Hugo Awards list here.
For the voting process, World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) members of the 2025 Seattle Worldcon and 2024 Glasgow Worldcon were eligible to make up to five equally weighted nominations in each category of the Hugo Awards finalists. The highest nominated works and people went on to the final ballot, where WSFS members of Seattle Worldcon 2025 voted among them to finalize the winners.
About THE TAINTED CUP
In Daretana’s greatest mansion, a high imperial officer lies dead—killed, to all appearances, when a tree erupted from his body. Even here at the Empire’s borders, where contagions abound and the blood of the leviathans works strange magical changes, it’s a death both terrifying and impossible.
Assigned to investigate is Ana Dolabra, a detective whose reputation for brilliance is matched only by her eccentricities. Rumor has it that she wears a blindfold at all times, and that she can solve impossible cases without even stepping outside the walls of her home.
At her side is her new assistant, Dinios Kol, magically altered in ways that make him the perfect aide to Ana’s brilliance. Din is at turns scandalized, perplexed, and utterly infuriated by his new superior—but as the case unfolds and he watches Ana’s mind leap from one startling deduction to the next, he must admit that she is, indeed, the Empire’s greatest detective.
As the two close in on a mastermind and uncover a scheme that threatens the Empire itself, Din realizes he’s barely begun to assemble the puzzle that is Ana Dolabra—and wonders how long he’ll be able to keep his own secrets safe from her piercing intellect.
By an “endlessly inventive” (Vulture) author with a “wicked sense of humor” (NPR), The Tainted Cup mixes the charms of detective fiction with brilliant world-building to deliver a fiendishly clever mystery that’s at once instantly recognizable and thrillingly new.