Today, the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation announced that Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera has won the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Award for Fiction, a $25,000 cash prize given to a writer for a single work of imaginative fiction.
The prize recognizes those writers Le Guin spoke of in her 2014 National Book Awards speech—realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now.
A panel of authors—Matt Bell, Indra Das, Kelly Link, Sequoia Nagamatsu, and Rebecca Roanhorse—selected Rakesfall as the winner from a shortlist of eight books. They had this to say about the novel:
“As fluid and changing as water, Rakesfall funnels genre, narrative structures, characters, and our conception of time into a spiritual kaleidoscope. Rakesfall trusts us to follow, across the literary equivalent of light years, a deeply felt and moving story of grief, loss, and ultimately hope to savor in dark times. Like Le Guin, Vajra Chandrasekera writes about colonialism and power with a kind of moral clarity and strength that speaks to the heart as well as the mind. He has created a masterclass of the possibilities inherent in fiction. Rakesfall is an extraordinary achievement in science fiction, and a titanic work of art.”
In his acceptance speech, Chandrasekera expressed his gratitude for receiving the award and said, “Rakesfall is a book about power, and it talks about the arrogance and undeserved self-belief of the powerful, their bottomless desire for more power, more wealth, until they shamelessly strive for not only a throne but godhood. This is actually the world we already live in, which is why our oligarchs are obsessed with longevity, AI, and transcending mere humanity.
“Late capitalism’s death drive is so perfected that it is not only willing but eager to sacrifice the real present in pursuit of an imaginary future, and the language, the concepts they use to construct that imaginary, come from a vocabulary and a grammar built by science fiction.”
Check out the video below of actor Ebon Moss-Bachrach announcing Chandrasekera receiving the award, as well as Chandrasekera’s full acceptance speech.
