Every Next Manga Award winner got an anime within four years
On September 16 the Next Manga Award announces its 2026 results. Before that happens, it is worth looking at what winning this award has actually predicted.
The award is decided entirely by reader votes and is restricted to series that have not broken out yet: five volumes or fewer, or a serialization that started recently. It is not a “best of the year” list. It is a snapshot of what Japanese readers think is about to get big.
The track record is the interesting part.
Seven winners, seven anime
Every winner so far has received an anime adaptation, and every one of them landed within four years of the win.
| Series | Won | Anime premiered | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| My Hero Academia | Feb 2015 | April 2016 | 1 yr 2 mo |
| Kaguya-sama: Love Is War | Aug 2017 | Jan 2019 | 1 yr 5 mo |
| Oshi no Ko | Aug 2021 | April 2023 | 1 yr 8 mo |
| Medalist | Aug 2022 | Jan 2025 | 2 yr 5 mo |
| Spy × Family | Aug 2019 | April 2022 | 2 yr 8 mo |
| Kaiju No. 8 | Aug 2021 | April 2024 | 2 yr 8 mo |
| The Apothecary Diaries | Aug 2019 | Oct 2023 | 4 yr 0 mo |
The median sits around two and a half years. The spread is wide — fourteen months at the fast end, four years at the slow end — so this is a pattern rather than a rule. But not one winner has fallen outside the four-year window.
Why the anime date is the one that matters
For most English-speaking readers, the anime is the moment a series stops being obscure. Spy × Family had been simulpublished in English for nearly three years before the anime aired in April 2022. Most people found it in April 2022.
The Apothecary Diaries is the clearest case. It won in August 2019. English readers largely discovered it in October 2023, when the anime started. That is a four-year gap between the Japanese verdict and the English arrival — four years in which the answer was already public, in Japanese, on a website anyone could load.
That gap is the whole point of this site.
What this means for September 16
The 2026 results will list twenty titles in the print category and twenty in the web category, each with its vote total. Most of them will have no English release. Some will have no English-language coverage at all beyond a headline naming the winner.
If the pattern holds, a large share of that list will reach English-speaking readers somewhere between 2028 and 2030.
This year’s numbers so far: 7,952 titles entered, 139,878 entry votes cast, 100 nominees — 40 print, 60 web. Voting closed in July. Results are announced on a live broadcast on the evening of September 16, Japan time.
Which is 6am on the US east coast, and 11am in the UK.
We will have the full rankings up shortly after.