Vajra Chandrasekera has won the fourth annual Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, given to “a writer for a single work of imaginative fiction,” for Rakesfall.
Chandrasekera’s novel, published last year by Tordotcom, follows Annelid and Leveret, who meet during the Sri Lankan civil war and are reincarnated many times but are always bound together. A critic for Kirkus called the book “poetic and unique, but possibly not worth the effort to plumb its depths.”
The jurors for the prize, authors Matt Bell, Indra Das, Kelly Link, Sequoia Nagamatsu, and Rebecca Roanhorse, said in a statement, “As fluid and changing as water, Rakesfall funnels genre, narrative structures, characters, and our conception of time into a spiritual kaleidoscope.…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.”
In his acceptance speech, Chandrasekera said, “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. 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.”
The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize was first awarded in 2022 to Khadija Abdalla Bajaber for The House of Rust. The other previous winners are Rebecca Campbell for Arboreality and Anne de Marcken for It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
