The shortlist for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction have been revealed, with eight authors in the running for the annual award given annually to “a writer for a single work of imaginative fiction.”
Vajra Chandrasekera made the shortlist for Rakesfall, along with Andrea Hairston for Archangels of Funk, Nalo Hopkinson for Blackheart Man, and Margaret Killjoy for The Sapling Cage.
Jared Pechaček was named a finalist for The West Passage, Eden Robins for Remember You Will Die, Nghi Vo for The City in Glass, and Ursula Whitcher for North Continent Ribbon.
The judging panel for this year’s prize is composed of authors Matt Bell, Indra Das, Kelly Link, Sequoia Nagamatsu, and Rebecca Roanhorse.
The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, which comes with a $25,000 cash award, was established in 2022. The Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation said that the award “will be given to a writer whose work reflects the concepts and ideas that were central to Ursula’s own work, including but not limited to: hope, equity, and freedom; non-violence and alternatives to conflict; and a holistic view of humanity’s place in the natural world.”
Le Guin, who died in 2018 at the age of 88, was celebrated for SFF classics such as A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness.
The previous winners of the Le Guin Prize are Khadija Abdalla Bajaber for The House of Rust, Rebecca Campbell for Arboreality, and Anne de Marcken for It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over.
The winner of this year’s award will be announced on October 21.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
