Audition by Pip Adam (Coffee House Press) has won the $25,000 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, honoring "a single work of imaginative fiction" and recognizing "writers who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now."
Organizers described the winning book this way: "In Audition, a spaceship is hurtling through the cosmos. Squashed immobile into its largest room are three giants: Alba, Stanley, and Drew. If they talk, the spaceship keeps moving; if they are silent, they resume growing. Talk they must, and as they do, Alba, Stanley, and Drew recover their shared memory of what has been done to their former selves--experiences of imprisonment, violence, and disempowerment."
The judges said, "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. [Audition] 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."
Adam, who lives in New Zealand, has written three other novels--Nothing to See (2020), The New Animals (2017), which won the Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction, and I'm Working on a Building (2013)--and the short story collection Everything We Hoped For (2010).