By Staff Reports

Oni Press is thrilled to announce that the acclaimed fantasy webcomic turned graphic novel Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker and Wendy Xu has been nominated for a Hugo Award in the Best Graphic Story or Comic category.

On April 8, 2020 the Hugo Award nominations were announced by CoNZealand, the 78th Annual World Science Fiction Convention via the organization’s YouTube channel. Per the Hugo Award website, CoNZealand received and counted over 1,500 valid nominating ballots with a total of more than 27,000 nominations. Members nominated up to five works/people in each category, and the top six works/people in each category were shortlisted as finalists.

Mooncakes began online in 2015 and has been updated on the first and fifteenth of each month since. Lion Forge first announced its publication in 2017, and it was published in October 2019. Since publication it has been listed as one of 55 of the Best Queer Books of 2019 by Autostraddle and among The Best LGBTQ Graphic Novels of 2019 by the Advocate. Mooncakes was a 2019 Goodreads Choice Award finalist, a 2019 CYBIL finalist, and has been selected as one of the 2020 ALA Rainbow Top Ten List

Mooncakes follows Nova Huang, a young deaf witch living with her grandmothers in their sleepy New England town, as she helps them run their bookstore when news of a demon horse in the woods reaches her. Exploring the tales, she comes across a white wolf who turns out to be her childhood crush, Tam Lang, on a mission to also learn the truth about the demon horse. As a werewolf, Tam has been wandering from place to place for years, unable to call any town home.

Pursued by dark forces eager to claim the magic of wolves and out of options, Tam turns to Nova for help. Their latent feelings are rekindled against the backdrop of witchcraft, untested magic, occult rituals, and family ties both new and old in this enchanting tale of self-discovery.

Suzanne Walker is a Chicago-based writer and editor. She is co-creator of the graphic novel Mooncakes (Lion Forge, October 2019) with artist Wendy Xu. Her short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld, and she has published nonfiction articles with Uncanny Magazine, Women Write About Comics, and the anthology Barriers and Belonging: Personal Narratives of Disability. She has spoken at numerous conventions on a variety of topics ranging from disability representation in sci-fi/fantasy to the importance of fair compensation for marginalized SF/F creators. You can find her posting pictures of her cat and occasionally yelling about baseball on Twitter: @suzusaur.

Wendy Xu is a Brooklyn-based illustrator and comics artist. She is co-creator of “Mooncakes,” a graphic novel out in 2019 from Lion Forge Comics. Her work has been featured on Catapult, Barnes & Noble Sci-fi/Fantasy Blog, and Tor.com, among other places. You can find her on twitter @angrygirlcomics or on instagram as @artofwendyxu.

The 2020 Hugo Awards will be awarded at the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). Worldcon is currently scheduled to take place July 29 through August 2, 2020 in Wellington, New Zealand.