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.

Acorn Prize winning author Pip Adam reflects on her genre-bending novel, Audition, released in July 2023.

Audition is an argument for the abolition of prisons and our present punishment-based justice system. The first time I stepped into a prison I experienced a quiet sense that this approach to crime didn’t work. This small voice has grown over the last twenty-eight years until 2019, when it became a fact shouted at the loudest decibels which needed an outlet. 

In this book, I have tried to imagine a new way of dealing with the harm we do each other. To do this, I needed to escape the power structures that are at play in our contemporary lives. I imagined a growth in physical power of those with the least politically power in order to expose the nature of power captured by our present systems. I was interested in what happens when someone grows too big for the space society allocates them. I kept hearing my grandmother telling me I was getting too big for my boots. This is a first-contact novel – the Utopia I write belongs to someone else. At first this worried me, but I think in the end it helped me face questions of colonisation and brought me to realise fully that if we don’t get Land Back in the hands of its rightful owners the project of prison reform is lost.

The spaceship Audition is based on Saydnaya prison in Syria. I am indebted to Lawrence Abu Hamdan who worked with ‘ear-witnesses’ to use ‘echo profiling’ to build an understanding of the architecture of Saydnaya. Of Saydnaya, Abu Hamden says, ‘The prison is really an echo chamber: one person being tortured is like everyone being tortured, because the sound circulates throughout the space, through air vents and water pipes. You cannot escape it.’ James E.K. Parker’s work on sound’s place in war and torture was revolutionary to my own understanding and this book. I’m very grateful to Liquid Architecture for making so many amazing talks about sound available on their website. 

—Pip Adam