Ursula K. Le Guin
@ursulakleguin.com
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Official account for the celebrated author of novels, short stories, poetry, children’s books and essays. https://www.ursulakleguin.com/
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We're thrilled to present the shortlist for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction:
A white mug with the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction logo holds a spray of lavender next to a stack of the eight books shortlisted for this year's prize:
North Continent Ribbon by Ursula Whitcher
Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins
The City in Glass by Nghi Vo
Archangels of Funk by Andrea Hairston
The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy
Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera
The West Passage by Jared Pechaček
Blackheart Man by Nalo Hopkinson
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Many thanks to the publisher and curators for these photos!
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Today, The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin opens at AA Gallery in London! Curated by Sarah Shin and Harriet Jennings, the exhibition presents a selection of Ursula's maps, including some that have never been exhibited before.
A photo of the entrance to The Word for World exhibition, with two banners hanging vertically down outside the doorway to a brick building with white-paned windows. A row of bicycles are parked in front. The banners are purple and white and say the name of the exhibition and Ursula K. Le Guin's name. A cord-wrapped rock rests on a vivid blue background next to a map of and program for The Word for World exhibition. A stack of copies of The Word for World book, which shows the title in vivid blue against a black cloth cover.
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🌟 Shortlisted for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction 🌟 Remember You Will Die traces the lives of artists, activists, scientists, and more as they intersect with the existence of a yearning AI. Eden Robins weaves a polyphonic narrative that is intergenerational, art-filled, and subversive.
A photograph of Eden Robins' novel Remember You Will Die, which rests on a black metal shelf next to a small glass vase full of greenery: red berries, green and white flowers, and a shaggy sprig of foliage. “Profoundly mistrustful of her own legacy, Dante Pellegrino would have hated this belated obituary. But then again, such remembrances are not for the dead at all. They are for the living—the living now and the living to come. Remember us, we whisper into the ears of the future. Our mistakes have made you possible.” from Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins
Reposted by Ursula K. Le Guin
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A clowder of advance readers got their paws on @ursulakleguin.com’s Book of Cats (yes, sitting on top of a book counts as reading for these little guys). Explore this full-color album of cat-centric poems, cartoons, and prose pieces, in bookstores today. loa.org/books/ursula-k-le-guins-book-of-cats/
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🎉 Happy pub day to both Book of Cats and the newly reissued Searoad!

We will work on obtaining photo evidence of Pard with his latest bookish appearance, but in the meantime here are Bat (who matches the book) and Ziti (who is more curious about it).
A black cat curled up against a taupe sheet sniffs suspiciously at Ursula K. Le Guin's Book of Cats A long-haired gray cat, stretched along the back of a blanket-covered blue sofa, sniffs curiously at Ursula K. Le Guin's Book of Cats A copy of the new edition of Searoad, which has a cover detailed with stylized streaks of blue that turn into mountains and waves below the title, rests crookedly (oops) on a blue plush background.
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Something new from this corner of the internet: a newsletter! It will be irregular, not too frequent, and full of Ursula-related news. The first one, which went out last week, contains a note from Theo Downes-Le Guin, explaining a bit of the why and the wherefore. Here's part of that note.
A Welcome from Theo Downes-Le Guin
One of the great pleasures of my work as literary executor is the sense that we are creating a community around my mother’s writing and ideas. If I’m honest with myself, however, I know that this community already exists. Any time two people read the same book, and that book resonates with them, the potentiality for a community exists, and the chance that destiny will throw those two readers together increases exponentially. This is why text is a great tool for subversion, resistance, and revolution. So at best, I am slightly hastening this coming-together. Ursula’s dear friend, moral compass, and tech mentor Vonda McIntyre had the foresight to set up early accounts for Ursula on Twitter and Facebook, to discourage impostors. We didn’t do anything with the accounts until after 2018, because Ursula had no interest in the style of communication that socials demand. After she died, things changed. As part of my grieving, I wanted to talk and write more about her, to as many people as possible. (I also learned, over the time, that this is my job description as executor.) Instagram, because it is image-based, allowed me to share glimpses of her life without crossing the line of privacy and intimacy. Over the years, and with the deft guidance of my colleague Molly Templeton, we have created a tone (and a respectable following) on social media that my mother would have tolerated, if not embraced. I am certain that if she had ever jumped on Twitter (now, for us, Bluesky), she would have treated it as she treated her blog—a one-way channel that idiosyncratically alternated between intimate musings and fiery analysis of the political and ethical failings of society. I miss those tweets that never were. But it is not my job to try to simulate them—I’m not her, we have what she wrote, and we are fortunate for that. In any event, social media was never an Ursula thing. A newsletter, though—that’s an Ursula thing. I tell you this with authority, because among many grueling tasks immediately after she died, I was responsible for reviewing her inbox, to make sure no email went unanswered. In so doing, I found a window into the breadth and depth of her email reading—which included a lot of newsletters! She was no stranger to unsubscribe buttons, couldn’t abide a messy inbox, so I know what I found there was of value to her (and no, I can’t tell you; that does cross a line).
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Vajra Chandrasekera (@vajra.me) introduces his second novel, Rakesfall, which is is shortlisted for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

For more about this year's shortlist: www.ursulakleguin.com/prize25
Vajra Chandrasekera reads from Rakesfall
YouTube video by Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation
www.youtube.com
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Ursula wrote in the introduction to this 1978 edition of Planet of Exile, “Once I was asked what I thought the central, constant theme of my work was, and I said spontaneously, ‘Marriage.’"

Cover art by Dan Sneberger, published by Harper & Row.
The 1978 Harper & Row edition of Planet of Exile has art by Dan Sneberger; it shows a hand rising out of a snowy landscape, grasping a long narrow rocket. The sky beyond the mountains in the background is a  rich orange shading into blue near the top.
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🌟 Shortlisted for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction 🌟 Nghi Vo’s latest novel, The City in Glass, is a story about deeply understanding and loving a place, and about the difficult, necessary, meaningful work required to rebuild when one’s world is irrevocably broken.
A copy of The City in Glass by Nghi Vo sits on a black shelf next to a small vase holding four brightly colored flowers. One of them is an orange very close to the orange of the flames on the book cover, which depicts an archway with two statues, behind which a city is in flames. “She had been given nothing. She had taken it, and it was hers to neglect and destroy if she so chose. Her family had learned that much from watching the humans that swarmed the world, that love could be a destructive thing. The angels understood love as destruction. She had chosen a different way to love Azril, and this destruction had nothing to do with her.” from The City in Glass by Nghi Vo
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"Autumn" is the first part of "Six Quatrains," which appears in So Far So Good (Copper Canyon Press, 2018).
Ursula K. Le Guin's poetry collection So Far So Good: Final Poems 2014-2018, the cover of which shows a river in the foreground, with golden, rugged hills in the background. AUTUMN

gold of amber
red of ember
brown of umber
all September
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Coming in May 2026: A new edition of The Dispossessed! This one is part of HarperCollins' new American Classics line, all of which have nifty graphic covers.

www.harpercollins.com/products/the...
The cover of HarperCollins' American Classics edition of The Dispossessed is primarily purple, with a text box in the middle containing the title and author's name - and the details "fiction" and "published 1974." A black circle, moon or planet, rises over the top of the box; a purple circle (also moon or planet) rises at the bottom, so that it slightly overlaps the design. The circles represent Anarres and Urras.
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Thank you for sharing this!
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Thank you for sharing this!
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Because it is always a little funny to post in first person here: The "us" in this sentence is Theo Downes-Le Guin, Ursula's son and literary executor, and @mollytempleton.com (hi, it's me, I'm typing this) who works with Theo on many projects, including the prize and the UKL social media presence.
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Are you doing a neat Ursula-related project? Talking about her work on a podcast, or reviewing the prize shortlist, or anything else? We'd love to hear about it, if so! You can always tag us here, and every email that comes through the contact form is read by an actual person.
Ursula K. Le Guin — Contact form
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