Announcing The Ursula K Le Guin Prize for Fiction

 I found this out through my morning perusal of Google News, from The Guardian: 

The Ursula K Le Guin prize for fiction will be awarded for the first time next year, on 21 October, which would have been the Earthsea author’s 93rd birthday. Worth $25,000 (£18,000), it will go to a work of “imaginative fiction”, with the intention of recognising the writers Le Guin spoke of in her 2014 acceptance speech. She said at the time that she was sharing the medal with “all the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long – my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for 50 years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists”. When the hard times arrive, Le Guin said, “we’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality”.

Le Guin died in 2018, aged 88. Theo Downes-Le Guin, her son and literary executor said he hoped the prize would “provide meaningful help and recognition to writers who might otherwise not receive it.

The Ursula K. Le Guin website has this information:

To be eligible for the 2022 Prize, a book must also be:

• A book-length work of imaginative fiction written by a single author.
• Published in the U.S. in English or in translation to English. (In the case of a translated work winning the Prize, the cash prize will be equally divided between author and translator.)
• Published in 2022. 

A writer may receive the Prize only once.

The Prize also gives weight to those writers whose access to resources, due to race, gender, age, class or other factors, may be limited; who are working outside of institutional frameworks such as MFA programs; who live outside of cultural centers such as New York; and who have not yet been widely recognized for their work.

The nomination period will begin February 1, 2022. To be notified when nominations open, please sign up for emails below.

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