Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation has announced its shortlist for the third annual Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

Edmonton-based Premee Mohamed is one of 10 finalists for her novel The Siege of Burning Grass, published this spring by Solaris Books, an imprint of Rebellion Publishing in the U.K.

The $25,000 prize is given to an author for a single work of imaginative fiction that reflects the ideas that were central to Ursula K. Le Guin’s own writing, which she articulated in her 2014 National Book Awards speech: “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being…. realists of a larger reality.”

The full shortlist can be found here.

Canadian Rebecca Campbell won the prize in 2023 for her novella Arboreality and Khadija Abdalla Bajaber won the inaugural prize in 2002 for The House of Rust.

Margaret Atwood and Omar El Akkad are judges for the 2024 prize along with Megan Giddings, Ken Liu, and Carmen Maria Machado.

The foundation is a nonprofit directed by a board composed of family members of Ursula K. Le Guin that was established in 2023 to continue and expand “the artistic and community-focused legacies” of the celebrated American author of speculative fiction.

The winner will be announced on Le Guin’s birthday on October 21.