pip adam wins 2026 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction for the 'astonishing’ novel Audition
The team here at Te Herenga Waka University Press is thrilled that pip adam has won the 2026 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction for her novel Audition.
Published in 2023 by Te Herenga Waka University Press in Aotearoa and by Giramondo in Australia and Peninsula Press in the United Kingdom in the same year, Audition was then published in the US by Coffee House Press in 2025, making it eligible for this year’s prize.
The annual award honours a single work of imaginative fiction and is inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s call for writers who are ‘realists of a larger reality,’ able to imagine alternatives to the way we live now. US$25,000 is awarded to the winner.
The judges described Audition as 'an ambitious and original book about many things: the carceral state, dehumanization, memory and, perhaps above all, forgiveness as a way forward.'
They say, ‘pip 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. 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. An astonishing and ultimately joyful work.’
This win is a remarkable international recognition for one of Aotearoa’s most distinctive fiction writers. Audition was also shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and longlisted for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award.
In a powerful acceptance speech filmed at Te Matapihi Ki Te Ao Nui, pip said, ‘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 comes from, she is always there. So my first thanks must go to Ursula K. Le Guin. Not just for showing me a way 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.’
Audition is a brilliant, strange, humane novel, and this award is just perfectly aligned with the kind of writer pip is. We couldn’t be prouder to be pip’s publishers in Aotearoa and be part of sharing her work with readers.
The award comes just two months after THWUP published pip’s latest novel, kluge, on 13 August. Another look to the possible future, kluge is a workplace satire about artificial intelligence, technocracy and the tech billionaire, kluge tells the story of the end days of a tech company and its all-powerful owner.
In 2025, pip was the recipient of the Michael King Writers Fellowship from Creative New Zealand. The $100,000 Fellowship is awarded every two years to an established New Zealand writer of literature to work on a major project. Her fellowship project involves writing three works for live performance, starting with a theatrical adaptation of Audition.
pip adam is also the author of The New Animals, which won the Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction, as well as Nothing to See, I’m Working on a Building and the short story collection Everything We Hoped For. She is Tangata Tiriti and lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, and she makes the Better off Read podcast.
pip's author photo is by Rachel Lynch