July 16, 2024, 1:25pm
The Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust has announced the shortlist for the third annual Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.
The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction is an annual $25,000 cash prize given to a writer for a single work of imaginative fiction. The award is intended to recognize 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.”
The ten books on the shortlist were chosen by the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation after a public nomination process. The ultimate winner will be chosen by a panel of judges—Margaret Atwood, Omar El Akkad, Megan Giddings, Ken Liu, and Carmen Maria Machado—and announced on October 21st, Le Guin’s birthday.
Until then, here’s the shortlist:
Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors (Tordotcom Publishing)
Sarah Cypher, The Skin and Its Girl (Ballantine Books)
Anne de Marcken, It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over (New Directions)
Samantha Harvey, Orbital (Grove Press)
Alissa Hattman, Sift (The 3rd Thing)
Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Library of Broken Worlds (Scholastic Press)
Micaiah Johnson, Those Beyond the Wall (Del Rey)
Premee Mohamed, The Siege of Burning Grass (Solaris)
Emily Tesh, Some Desperate Glory (Tordotcom Publishing)
Nghi Vo, Mammoths at the Gates (Tordotcom Publishing)