The Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust announced the shortlist for its second annual Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, where the ultimate recipient will receive a $25,000 prize. Here are the nine nominees!
- Wolfish by Christiane M. Andrews
- Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell
- Spear by Nicola Griffith
- Ten Planets by Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman
- The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez
- Brother Alive by Zain Khalid
- Meet Us by the Roaring Sea by Akil Kumarasamy
- Geometries of Belonging by R.B. Lemberg
- Drinking from Graveyard Wells by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu
Congrats to all the authors on the shortlist!
The winner will be selected by the following authors: William Alexander, Alexander Chee, Karen Joy Fowler, Tochi Onyebuchi, and Shruti Swamy. “We are seeking a balance of writers from different backgrounds, at different points in their careers and with varying levels of recognition,” said Le Guin’s son, Theo Downes-Le Guin to Electric Literature about those selected to judge. “It’s important to me that we have at least one panelist who knew Ursula well. Eventually that will no longer be possible without having repeat panelists, but we still have years of friends, former students and peers to invite. For selectors who didn’t know Ursula well or at all, we’re looking for evidence of a relationship or affinity to her work. We’re not trying to create a partisan panel, but we need selectors who can assess the shortlist against the ideas found in Ursula’s work and against her standards of excellent writing.”
Downes-Le Guin is also the executor of Le Guin’s estate and the founder of the Prize, which is described by Electric Literature as being created to continue his mother’s legacy as “an author who defied genre, interrogated capitalism, celebrated hope and possibility in her writing, and who encouraged artists to find intellectual and artistic freedom in their work.”
The winner will be announced on October 25, 2023.
