The shortlist for the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Fiction Prize, to be given each year to “a single work of imaginative fiction,” has been revealed at Electric Literature.
Nine books appear on the shortlist for the $25,000 prize, which was announced last year by the Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust, and is named after the legendary author of Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness. Le Guin died in 2018.
Khadija Abdalla Bajaber made the shortlist for The House of Rust, her magical realist novel that won the first Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize. Matt Bell was named a finalist for his ecological novel Appleseed.
Michelle Ruiz Keil is a finalist for her young adult novel Summer in the City of Roses, along with fellow YA author Darcie Little Badger, for A Snake Falls to Earth, which was a Newbery Honor book.
Cynthia Zhang’s After the Dragons made the shortlist, as did Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race, Olga Ravn’s The Employees (translated by Martin Aitken), Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark, and Catherynne M. Valente’s The Past Is Red.
The prize is judged by writers adrienne maree brown, Becky Chambers, Molly Gloss, David Mitchell, and Luis Alberto Urrea. The winner will be named on Oct. 21, which would have been Le Guin’s 93rd birthday.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
