Pip Adam’s book, Audition, has been awarded the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. The US$25,000 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize is awarded to a writer for a single work of imaginative fiction. Accepting the prize for her novel Audition, Adam said she was honoured and was thankful to the judges “for meeting this strange book where it is”.

“This is why I love writing and reading. I believe there is an incredible magic in the labour of trying to use words to describe the unspeakable, or to write that which does not exist yet.”

Judges said Adam’s book, Audition, was “an astonishing and ultimately joyful work… audacious and surprising, and transcendent in the way it depicts acceptance and hope”.

“Audition is an ambitious and original book about many things: the carceral state, dehumanisation, memory and, perhaps above all, forgiveness as a way forward.

“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.”

In a recorded video message, Adam thanked those who supported her in writing and publishing the book, but also had a special thanks to the late Californian author Le Guin herself: “Not just for showing me a way to read and to write, but for showing me how to live as a writer and a human being: to speak up when staying silent would be easier; to stand up, no matter what the risk.

“I live about as far away as it is possible to, from where the work of Ursula K. Le Guin was written. But when I talk about where my work, my thinking, and my activism come from, she is always there.”

Adam is no stranger to literary awards – in 2025 she was awarded the Creative New Zealand Michael King Writer’s Fellowship, worth NZ$100,000. In 2018, she won the fiction prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for The New Animals.

Audition was first published in New Zealand in 2023 by Te Herenga Waka University Press, and was published in the US in 2025 by Coffee House Press.

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was a multi award-winning American author who wrote a vast catalogue of novels, essays and poetry collections, including the celebrated Left Hand of Darkness and the Earthsea series. The award was created in her memory in 2022.

Author

Paul Olayioye