le guin shortlist
Scintillating friends,
The Ursula K. Le Guin foundation announced the finalists for their 2025 prize today. The banner shows eight writers, in alphabetical order by last name:
I'm on the bottom right, underneath Nghi Vo.
I learned North Continent Ribbon was going to be on the shortlist a couple of weeks ago, and I've been buzzing with excitement ever since. The Le Guin prize is:
given to a writer whose work reflects the concepts and ideas that were central to Ursula [Le Guin]’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.
North Continent Ribbon is a book about nonviolent struggles for social change (and the ways those struggles are framed as violence, by the parts of society that like things very well just as they are). It's also directly influenced by Le Guin. Some of that influence was conscious: I thought of Le Guin's Hainish stories, while collecting the histories of Nakharat. But there's another, bone-deep layer, one that comes of reading particular books and stories of hers over and over, in the tween years when I read a book a day and didn't always know what held me so absorbed.
It wouldn't have occurred to me to claim that influence, unprompted, any more than as a poet I would cite Yeats--can't we all quote the Creation of Éa as easily as "Sailing to Byzantium"? But the coincidence of given names does mean that people ask me about Le Guin more often than they'd ask another freshly minted science fiction writer, and I have begun to wonder if there are patterns of word and image and bright light on deep water that Le Guin and I specifically hold in common.
Though I do not mean to imply that this is a prize for the best Le Guin imitator! The writers on this shortlist whose work I know write weird, complicated, spikey, personal books that are unafraid of their own earnestness, and I am so tremendously honored simply to be in their company.
Here are Kosmas and Gennoveus on a summer afternoon, playing a game of shadows:
Yours,
Ursula.