The Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation has awarded its 2025 Prize for Fiction to two-time Hugo Award nominee and Nebula Award-winner Vajra Chandrasekera for his sci-fi novel Rakesfall.

The prize, established in 2022 and named for the late, great Portland author of speculative fiction, is an annual $25,000 cash award for a book-length work of imaginative fiction by a single author. According to the foundation’s website, “[It] 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.” The nomination process is open to all, and the winner is chosen by a selection panel of fellow authors. The winner was announced last week.

Chandrasekera is a native of Colombo, Sri Lanka, currently in New York on a writing fellowship. In 2024, he was shortlisted for his debut novel The Saint of Bright Doors, with the prize ultimately going to Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over. Since then, The Saint of Bright Doors has accrued a raft of other honors including the Ignyte Award, the Locus Award, the IAFA William L. Crawford Fantasy Award, and the aforementioned Nebula, plus a multitude of additional nominations.

This year, Rakesfall, published in 2024 by Tordotcom Publishing, was pronounced the winner of the Le Guin Prize from among eight semi-finalists including Margaret Killjoy’s The Sapling Cage, Nalo Hopkinson’s Blackheart Man, and Andrea Hairston’s Archangels of Funk. The panel of selectors — Matt Bell, Indra Das, Kelly Link, Sequoia Nagamatsu, and Rebecca Roanhorse — had this to say about their decision:

“Like Le Guin, Vajra Chandrasekera writes about colonialism and power with a kind of moral clarity and strength that speaks to the heart as well as the mind. He has created a masterclass of the possibilities inherent in fiction. Rakesfall is an extraordinary achievement in science fiction, and a titanic work of art.”

In his acceptance speech, Chandrasekera said, “Rakesfall is a book about power, and it talks about the arrogance and undeserved self-belief of the powerful, their bottomless desire for … godhood. This is actually the world we already live in, which is why our oligarchs are obsessed with longevity, AI, and transcending mere humanity. The late capitalist death drive is so perfected that it is not only willing but eager to sacrifice the real present in pursuit of an imaginary future, and the concepts they use … come from a vocabulary and a grammar built by science fiction. This is a dangerous dynamic, but not a new one.”

Chandrasekera alluded to Theodor Herzl‘s 1902 Altneuland (The Old New Land), which envisioned the occupation of Palestine 40 years before the Nakba — the violent displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. “The speculative genres,” Chandrasekera observed, “are as fertile ground for monstrous imaginations as they are marvelous ones.”

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Le Guin, who died in 2018, is remembered for her career in the vanguard of speculative fiction, celebrated for works like The Left Hand of Darkness and the Earthsea cycle that famously critiqued capitalism, patriarchy, and colonial hegemony. The prize established in her name is subsidized by the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation, a nonprofit organized by her family to continue her legacies of art and community-building. In 2024, the foundation also donated Le Guin’s Northwest Portland home to Literary Arts to support the formation of the Ursula K. Le Guin Writers Residency.

“Le Guin is special to us all,” Chandrasekera said, “especially to writers in her tradition, because she’s one of those rare writers that I think all of us love and would claim for our own as influence, as elder, as Northern Star.”