Here’s the shortlist for the first Ursula K. Le Guin Fiction Prize.
The shortlist for the first Ursula K. Le Guin Fiction Prize is here, featuring works “of imaginative fiction” from nine authors.
Five jurors—adrienne maree brown, Becky Chambers, Molly Gloss, David Mitchell, and Luis Alberto Urrea—will select a winner for the $25,000 prize. The Ursula K. Le Guin Trust will announce the winner on October 21.
Theo Downs-Le Guin told Erin Bartnett of Electric Literature that many of the books nominated for the prize shared a spirit of innovation. There was, he said, “a larger desire to define paths forward that are, if not pragmatically feasible in the near future, nevertheless have that quality of making us think about other ways of being, other ways of living, that are different from the way of today, and may have more promise for our long-term viability as a species and for our place in the larger world.”
Here’s the full list of nominees:
Cynthia Zhang, After the Dragons (Stelliform Press)
Matt Bell, Appleseed (Custom House)
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Elder Race (Tordotcom Publishing)
Olga Ravn, tr. by Martin Aitken, The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century (New Directions)
Khadija Abdalla Bajaber, The House of Rust (Graywolf Press)
Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go in the Dark (William Morrow)
Catherynne M. Valente, The Past is Red (Tordotcom Publishing)
Darcie Little Badger, A Snake Falls to Earth (Levine Querido)
Michelle Ruiz Keil, Summer in the City of Roses (Soho Teen)
