Vajra Chandrasekera has won the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

Today, the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation announced Vajra Chandrasekera’s Rakesfall as the winner of the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, which seeks to reward books that represent the legendary writer’s literary, moral, and aesthetic ideals: “realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now.”

“As fluid and changing as water, Rakesfall funnels genre, narrative structures, characters, and our conception of time into a spiritual kaleidoscope,” said judges Matt Bell, Indra Das, Kelly Link, Sequoia Nagamatsu, and Rebecca Roanhorse, in a statement. “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.”

“Le Guin is special to us all, especially to writers in her tradition—because she’s one of those few rare writers that I think all of us love and would claim for our own, as influence, as elder, as northern star,” said Chandrasekera in his acceptance speech. “So I will say again how honored I am and how moved I am that my very strange book has a place in the history of this wonderful award in her name.”

Chandrasekera will be awarded a $25,000 cash prize. You can watch the prize announcement, including his full acceptance speech, here.