Happy New Year, FoLCs!
Hold onto your hats (and capes) because we’re heading into the 28th Annual Kerth Awards!
Authors, thank you for submitting your stories all year! Those that were
*completed* and posted online publicly by December 31st, 11:59pm (boards time) will be eligible for the 2026 Kerth Awards, as are those uploaded to the Archive in 2025, so long as they hadn’t been eligible before!
Last year’s trusty Kerth Committee is ready and raring to go again this season! As a friendly reminder, your Kerth Committee is:
Co-Kerth Coordinator — Sara/KSaraSara
Co-Kerth Coordinator — JadedEvie
Technical Coordinator — Darth Michael
Activities Coordinator — lovetvfan
Technical Advisor — Annette
Advisor/Consultant — KathyB
We're very excited for this team to be at the helm for another year, and we’re especially grateful to our advising team. Annette, with her decades of experience in running our sites, is always available when we need her brilliant advice, while Darth Michael oils the machine that is our Kerth infrastructure. lovetvfan coordinates the Kerth adjacent activities leading up to the Awards, and JadedEvie organizes the volunteer efforts, helps with communication, and writes the beloved quizzes. That brings us to our fearless leader and ceremony host, KSaraSara, and her dedication to keeping the spirit of the Kerth Awards alive in this decade. And finally, KathyB offers unparalleled expertise, as she was part of the original K-Com.
And we owe a big K-Com ‘thank you’ this year to blg1987, who’s already been volunteering by helping us connect with AO3 writers that aren’t on the boards to ensure that we have a wider pool of eligible stories!
But there’s more Kerth love to share before the ceremony itself! We need the help of lots of FoLCs to work with the K-Com to organize and present the ceremony. We’ll be posting some specific needs over the next few weeks, but start thinking about how you’d like to join in the fun this year. We’ll need big- and small-time commitments — everything from creating banners to presenting awards at the ceremony.
And this starts with category selection! The K-Com reviews the categories list every year to ensure it best fits the body of work that our authors have submitted in a given year. For instance, last year, a larger than average batch of Super-Short Stories gave us the Micro-Short Story category, to ensure a better proportion of awards to fit the influx of stories that were that length/size. But your feedback is important, too! Is there a great new category out there just waiting for an award? Is there a category in use that should be renamed, rethemed or just put out to pasture (at the Kent’s farm, of course!)? Give us your suggestions, thoughts and hopes for categories down below in this thread this month (
and get those category suggestions in by February 1st for consideration!).
Last year’s 2025 Category List was as follows:
- Best Micro-Short Story (1-5kB)
- Best Super-Short Story (5-10kB)
- Best Short Story (11-50kB)
- Best Mid-Length or Long Story (51-200kB or 201+kB)
- Best Comedy Story
- Best Dramatic Story
- Best Waffy Story
- Best Revelation
- Best Episode Adaptation (rewrite/fix-it/in-betweenie)
- Best Elseworlds/AU Story
- Best Kiss
- Best Original Character/Supporting Character
- Best Challenge Response
- Best New Author
- Best Overall Story
- Best Commenter/Feedback Giver
- Best Original Fanart
But MOST importantly, the number one thing any FoLC can do to help to support the authors and the Kerth Awards is to READ, NOMINATE and VOTE! This is the most meaningful way you can invest your time! Pressed for time? See if you can make it through every Micro-Short story! (Spoiler: that one is easy! They’re like super-snacks; you can’t read just one!) Only want to read Challenge stories? There are hints in most titles to guide you to them! Don’t know where to start? Maybe hit up one of the Best New Authors, since they’re just starting here, too! And then nominating and voting are just super simple forms (which do not require that you’ve read EVERYTHING); they’re designed for you to be able to quickly nominate and vote for your faves. But just make sure you take the time to read and FIND your next favorite stories to nominate!
Keep an eye out for another post coming shortly in which we'll share the Kerth Season timeline! The timeline will include opening dates for activities, like last year’s writing challenges and quizzes, with chances for everyone to participate in the award season!
We're so excited to get rolling on this next Kerth Award season!
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Have a question about the Kerths? Ask it here! Or you can PM any of the K-Com members or reach out on Discord too! You can also send an email to us here: Kcom@kerthawards.com
In order to help you find all things Kerth for this year, we’ve created a TOC for all the
🏆TOC for Kerth Awards 2026 Posts🏆.
The Kerth Committee
(KSaraSara, Darth Michael, lovetvfan, and JadedEvie)
