Audition by Pip Adam shortlisted for Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction

Audition by Pip Adam has been shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction 2026. Part science fiction, part social realism, the book tells the story of three giants hurtling through space. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing. Published by Giramondo in 2023, and released last year in the United States by Coffee House Press, Audition asks what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room – about how we imagine new forms of justice, and how we transcend the bodies and selves we are given. 

Write the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize judges, ‘As its three rom-com quoting central characters travel from incarceration to exile to a place beyond punishment, Audition explores carceral politics and the psychology of violence, and what healing from the harm of those systems might require in a world where embodiment and identity have lost all familiar forms.’

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 recognise 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 winner of the 2026 prize will be announced on 21 October 2026. The 2024 winner was It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken (Giramondo, 2024), which also won The Novel Prize.