Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for pip adam's AUDITION

Audition by New Zealand author pip adam has won the 2026 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, an international award worth US $25,000 for a single work of imaginative fiction. First presented in 2022, the prize recognises the kinds of writers Le Guin 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’. 

Beginning on a spaceship powered by the speech of three giants – who physically expand each time they are silent – Audition is a novel that blends science fiction and social realism to ask what happens when systems of power decide someone takes up too much room, and that imagines new forms of justice, and how we can transcend the bodies and selves we are given. 

‘Audition is an ambitious and original book about many things: the carceral state, dehumanization, memory and, perhaps above all, forgiveness as a way forward,’ wrote the judges. ‘pip adam uses innovative narrative structure and impeccable prose to do what SFF – what only SFF at its best – can do: make metaphor concrete to completely change our understanding not just of what is happening in the narrative but also how today’s society works. The book gradually assumes the urgency of survival as three people whom society has deemed worthless find their way back to themselves, each other, and hope. An astonishing and ultimately joyful work.’

Audition was published in 2023 by Te Herenga Waka University Press in Aotearoa and by Giramondo in Australia in the same year, and then released in the US by Coffee House Press in 2025, making it eligible for this year’s prize. The win is a remarkable international recognition for one of Aotearoa’s most distinctive fiction writers.

The award comes just two months after Te Herenga Waka University Press published adam’s latest novel, kluge, on 13 August. A workplace satire about artificial intelligence, technocracy and the tech billionaire, kluge tells the story of the end days of a tech company and its all-powerful owner through an AI narrator, in the style of a stand-up comedy special.

adam is also the author of The New Animals, which won the Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction, as well as Nothing to See, I’m Working on a Building and the short story collection Everything We Hoped For. She makes the Better off Read podcast and lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara.

More information about the prize and adam’s win is available on the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize website.