SOURCE: ELECTRIC LITERATURE
The $25,000 prize honors a book-length work of imaginative fiction
Today, the Ursula K. Le Guin Trust announces the Shortlist for the first Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. The prize honors a book-length work of imaginative fiction with $25,000. The nine shortlisted books will be considered by a panel of five jurors—adrienne maree brown, Becky Chambers, Molly Gloss, David Mitchell, and Luis Alberto Urrea. The winner will be announced later this year on October 21st, 2022, Ursula K. Le Guin’s birthday.
In 2014, Ursula K. Le Guin received a lifetime commendation from the National Book Foundation. In her six-minute acceptance speech, she delivered an elegant critique of capitalism, a call for artistic action, and also a practical demand for the conditions every writer deserves. She criticized publishing houses—including her own—for padding their own pockets by overcharging libraries, for leeching power and profit from editors and writers. She pinched the capitalist thread holding the publishing and artistic worlds together and elegantly, graciously, pulled at the seam. Before receiving the cheers and standing ovation, she turned her speech away from the business of publishing and back to the work of writers. She urged them, as she did in her 23 novels, 12 short story collections, 11 poetry collections, 13 children’s books, 5 essay collections, and 4 works of translation, to remember what all of this was really about. Writing is a calling that delivers its own commendation. That “beautiful reward,” she said: “Its name is freedom.”
Downes-Le Guin acknowledged the challenge of designing a prize in honor of a writer who was outspokenly critical of them.
How does one find artistic freedom? Money, while not the source of artistic freedom, can perhaps help create the conditions for it. Since Le Guin’s death in January, 2018, her son and literary executor, Theo Downes-Le Guin has been thinking of ways to honor his mother’s work, and share her art and ideas with a new generation of readers and writers. In our conversation earlier this week, Downes-Le Guin acknowledged the challenge of designing a prize in honor of a writer who was outspokenly critical of them. And yet, a prize seemed a fitting legacy because, at the same time, Downes-Le Guin noted, “She certainly believed in giving money directly to writers, with no strings attached, for them to use however they wished to. To create the space and the opportunity to write.”
Here is the Shortlist for the 2022 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, followed by a brief interview with Theo Downs-Le Guin. Erin Bartnett discussed the role of literary prizes in writers’ lives, the responsibilities of a literary trust, and how Ursula K. Le Guin’s artistic values shaped the making of this specific literary prize.
Appleseed by Matt Bell (Custom House)
In three braided stories, Matt Bell uses science fiction, myth, and fairytale in an exploration of how humanity moves both with and against the world. From two brothers seeding the land with apple trees to a distant future in which one lonely being crosses what’s left of North America after climate change, Appleseed is ambitious in its scope and compassionate in its telling.
Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tordotcom Publishing)
On a distant planet, an anthropologist in a tower has become part of local mythology—a sorcerer with seemingly incredible powers that might help a Fourth Daughter against a threatening demon. Adrian Tchaikovsky gives equal weight to the way two very different people see their world, showing that both stories—science and myth—are true, and both necessary for survival.
The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken (New Directions)
Olga Ravn’s novella is told in a series of reports made by the crew—human and otherwise—of an intergenerational, deep space ship. The Employees is set in a world where productivity has subsumed everything else. There is only work, and what people find in or despite of it: curiosity, attachment to strange objects, and an unsettled relationship with their humanoid colleagues.
The House of Rust by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber (Graywolf Press)
Young Aisha sets out in the company of a talking cat and a boat made of bones to rescue her fisherman father. Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s debut novel is grounded in a vivid sense of place and the way she continuously expands both Aisha’s world and her understanding of it—a world of leviathans, snake gods, and crows whose sharp eyes are on everyone.
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu (William Morrow)
In 2030, the Arctic plague rewrites the way people live. In How High We Go In the Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu imagines what a world shaped by this plague might look like—funerary skyscrapers, a theme park for dying children, new uses for technology—and how humanity could still find love and human connection in it.
The Past is Red by Catherynne M. Valente (Tordotcom Publishing)
Tetley Abednego lives on a garbage patch in the middle of the sea—one of the only livable places left in a flooded world. Catherynne M. Valente’s post-apocalyptic world looks like no one else’s, and despite the hard parts of Tetley’s existence, she’s resilient, wise, and full of hope that we can still make a broken world into a home.
A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger (Levine Querido)
A cottonmouth kid making his way in a world of spirits and monsters and a Lipan girl from our near future find their lives intersecting in Darcie Little Badger’s gracefully told young adult novel about home, stories, family, friendship, and the interconnectedness of worlds.
Summer in the City of Roses by Michelle Ruiz Keil (Soho Teen)
In Michelle Ruiz Keil’s punk-rock fairytale, a girl goes looking for her runaway brother in 1990s Portland, Oregon. What both of them find in the vintage shops and secret corners of the city is something else: Transformation, understanding, and a world more varied and welcoming and strange than they knew.