Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell (Stelliform Press) has won the $25,000 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, which is "given to a writer for a single book-length work of imaginative fiction."
Organizers said, "In looping, linked stories that travel through generations, Campbell explores the effects of climate change on one slice of British Columbia: what might happen as the planet changes, and how regular people might remake their homes by growing together and reconsidering other, gentler ways to live in a drastically reshaped world."
Judges said, "Arboreality is a eulogy for the world as we know it. Rebecca Campbell's extraordinary, deeply felt book explores the difficulties of the long hard project of survival. There are no heroes or villains here--only people making brave, difficult choices, out of hope and love for their community, for art, knowledge, and beauty. Arboreality imagines things that we haven't yet considered about what can and will go wrong with our gardens, libraries, and archives if we don't act now (maybe even if we do). In her masterful and profoundly ethical stories, Campbell asks us what might be saved, what must be saved, and what it will take to do so."