The Ursula K. Le Guin Trust has announced the Shortlist for the first Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, an award of $25,000 that honors a book-length work of imaginative fiction.
After Le Guin’s death in January 2018, the Trust looked for ways to honor Le Guin’s work and created the prize to help writers have the financial freedom to pursue their art.
“She certainly believed in giving money directly to writers, with no strings attached, for them to use however they wished to. To create the space and the opportunity to write,” explained Theo Downes-Le Guin, Le Guin’s son and literary executor, about the newly created Prize.
Here are the nine authors and respective books on the Shortlist for the 2022 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction:
- After the Dragons by Cynthia Zhang (Stelliform Press)
- Appleseed by Matt Bell (Custom House)
- Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tordotcom Publishing)
- The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken (New Directions)
- The House of Rust by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber (Graywolf Press)
- How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu (William Morrow)
- The Past is Red by Catherynne M. Valente (Tordotcom Publishing)
- A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger (Levine Querido)
- Summer in the City of Roses by Michelle Ruiz Keil (Soho Teen)
The jurors who will assess the Shortlist are adrienne maree brown, Becky Chambers, Molly Gloss, David Mitchell, and Luis Alberto Urrea. The winner will be announced later this year on October 21, Ursula K. Le Guin’s birthday.
