The 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction
Ursula K. Le Guin in 2016. Photo courtesy of and copyright William Anthony.
“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.”
The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction is an annual $25,000 cash prize given to a writer for a single work of imaginative fiction. This award is intended to recognize those writers Ursula spoke of in her 2014 National Book Awards speech—realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now.
The nomination process for the prize was open to all, and took place March 1 through March 31, 2025. Readers, authors, booksellers, publishers, librarians and any and everyone else were invited to nominate work that fits the following criteria:
The Prize will be given to a writer whose work reflects the concepts and ideas that were central to Ursula’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.
To be eligible for the 2025 Prize, a book must also be:
A book-length work of imaginative fiction written by a single author.
Published and/or distributed 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.)
First published/released in the U.S. between April 1, 2024, and December 31, 2024. Please note that the eligibility dates have changed. Going forward, each year’s prize will be given to a book published in the previous calendar year. However, since books published January 1, 2024 through March 31, 2024, were eligible for the 2024 Prize, they are not eligible for the 2025 Prize.
Available for purchase in the U.S. via multiple retail channels.
Any use of large language models/“AI” in the creation of a work must be disclosed. Works with undisclosed use of large language models/“AI” may be disqualified.
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 recipient of each year’s prize will be chosen by a selection panel of authors. The 2025 selection panel includes Matt Bell, Indrapramit Das, Kelly Link, Sequoia Nagamatsu, and Rebecca Roanhorse.
2025 Selection Panel
Photo by Jessica Bell
Matt Bell is the author most recently of the novel Appleseed (shortlisted for the 2022 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction) and the craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision. He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur's Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
Photo by Rajib Saha
Indra Das, aka Indrapramit Das, is a writer and editor from Kolkata, India. He is a Lambda Literary Award-winner for his debut novel The Devourers (Penguin Random House), and a Shirley Jackson Award-winner for his short fiction, which has appeared in publications including Tor.com, Clarkesworld, and Asimov's Science Fiction, and has been widely anthologized. He completed his MFA at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and was an Octavia E. Butler Scholar at the 2012 Clarion West Writers Workshop. His latest books are the Locus Award-nominated and British Fantasy and Subjective Chaos Kind of Award-winning novella The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar (Subterranean Press) and the anthology Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art (MIT Press). He currently resides in his hometown.
Photo by Adrianne Mathiowetz
Kelly Link is the author of the collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, Get in Trouble, and White Cat, Black Dog, and the novel The Book of Love. Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She was a 2018 MacArthur Fellow and has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She and Gavin J. Grant have co-edited a number of anthologies, including multiple volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and, for young adults, Steampunk! and Monstrous Affections. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press and co-edits the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is the owner of Book Moon, an independent bookshop in Easthampton, MA.
Link was born in Miami, Florida. She currently lives with her family, dog, and chickens in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Photo courtesy Sequoia Nagamatsu
Sequoia Nagamatsu is the author of the National Bestselling novel How High We Go in the Dark, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and the story collection Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone. His work has appeared in publications such as Conjunctions, The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, Tin House, Iowa Review, Lightspeed Magazine, and One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories.
Other honors include a fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and shortlist inclusions for The Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, the Ursula K Le Guin Prize, and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize. He was educated at Grinnell College (BA) and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale (MFA). He teaches creative writing at Saint Olaf College and the Rainier Writing Workshop. Originally from O’ahu, Hawai’i and the San Francisco Bay Area, he currently lives in Minneapolis with his wife, the writer Cole Nagamatsu; their cat, Kalahira; their real dog, Fenris; and a Sony Aibo robot dog named Calvino. He is at work on two other novels.
Photo by Emily Blasquez Photography
Rebecca Roanhorse is a New York Times bestselling and Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Award-winning speculative fiction writer. She has published multiple award-winning short stories and novels, including The Sixth World Series and the epic fantasy trilogy Between Earth & Sky. She was the guest editor of America's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy (2023) and a contributor to the New York Times "100 Best Books of the 21st Century." She has also written for Marvel and Lucasfilm, and her TV writing includes FX’s A Murder at the End of the World, and the Marvel series Echo for Disney+. She has had her own work optioned by Paramount, Amazon Studios, Netflix, and AMC Studios. She currently resides in Northern New Mexico.
