New prize in Le Guin’s name

A new literary award, The Ursula

K Le Guin Prize for Fiction has been announced by the Ursula K Le Guin Literary Trust. An annual cash prize of $25,000 will be given each year to the author of ‘a single book-length work of imaginative fiction.’ Nominations for the 2022 award will open on 2 February, and can be made by ‘readers, authors, booksellers, publishers, librarians and anyone else.’ The prize will be awarded on 21 October, which was the author’s birthday.

The jury for 2022 is jury is Adrienne Maree Brown, Becky Chambers,

Molly Gloss, David Mitchell, and Luis Alberto Urrea, and in making their decision they will take into account Le

Guin’s words from 2014: ‘Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.’

Announcing the prize, Theo Downes-Le Guin, Le Guin’s son and literary executor, said, ‘Many will appreciate an irony in that Ursula herself was suspicious of literary awards and prizes. At the same time, she recognised their genuine value in honouring a writer and increasing visibility of good, undervalued writing. She also knew that a bit of money, at the right moment and in the right spirit, can be a turning point in a writer’s ability to continue writing. I hope the Prize will provide meaningful help and recognition to writers who might otherwise not receive it.’

Ursula K Le Guin was the author of the classic Earthsea fantasy series, as well as such classic science fiction novels as The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Lathe of Heaven.