After announcing the shortlist of potential recipientsof the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction back in July, the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation has revealed that Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreality, a novel that explores the impact of climate change, has received the award.
The judges for this year’s award were William Alexander, Alexander Chee, Karen Joy Fowler, Tochi Onyebuchi, and Shruti Swamy.
“Arboreality is a eulogy for the world as we know it,” they said in a joint statement. “Rebecca Campbell’s extraordinary, deeply felt book explores the difficulties of the long hard project of survival. There are no heroes or villains here—only people making brave, difficult choices, out of hope and love for their community, for art, knowledge, and beauty. Arboreality imagines things that we haven’t yet considered about what can and will go wrong with our gardens, libraries, and archives if we don’t act now (maybe even if we do). In her masterful and profoundly ethical stories, Campbell asks us what might be saved, what must be saved, and what it will take to do so.”
Campbell, a Canadian author who previously won the Sunburst Award for short fiction in 2020 and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2021, was appreciative and reflective after receiving the award. “Given that the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation’s goal is to extend Le Guin’s legacy, the prize feels like a call as well as a celebration: a call to readers and writers and small presses and everyone else who wants to join the ‘realists of a larger reality’ Le Guin called for a decade ago,” she said in a statement.
Campbell received the prize during a virtual award ceremony last night, hosted by actor Alicia Vikander. You can watch her full acceptance speech here.
In its second year, the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for fiction awards a $25,000 cash prize annually to a single book-length work of imaginative fiction that, as Le Guin described in a 2014 speech, depicts “realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now.”
