The winners of the annual Hugo Awards for science fiction and fantasy were announced on Friday in a virtual ceremony that stirred up controversy because of remarks by its host, George R.R. Martin, author of A Song of Ice and Fire.

Arkady Martine took home the prize for best novel for A Memory Called Empire, while N.K. Jemisin won the best novelette award for Emergency Skin. Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone won the award for best novella for This Is How You Lose the Time War, and author Nnedi Okorafor, artist Tana Ford and colorist James Devlin won the prize for best graphic story or comic for LaGuardia.

Many SF/F fans were critical of Martin’s performance as master of ceremonies. “I have never in my life seen any awards ceremony that, in its whole, was so blatantly disrespectful of the nominees and winners,” wrote author Natalie Luhrs on the blog Pretty Terrible.

Luhrs, and many others who watched the ceremony, criticized Martin’s decision to speak at length about John W. Campbell, the late science fiction author who supported segregation and is widely seen as racist and misogynist.

Martin’s comments about Campbell were particularly jarring to many given that the prize for best related work went to Jeannette Ng for her acceptance speech at last year’s Hugo Awards, in which she criticized Campbell’s views on race. Ng won the John W. Campbell Award in 2019; the prize has since been renamed the Astounding Award.

Martin also mispronounced the names of several nominees, Luhrs wrote, and “nearly without exception the names he mispronounced were Black and brown.”

Martin seemed to address the controversy on his Twitter account, posting a quote from Voltaire: “We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies.”

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.