# Audition

**Author:** Pip Adam  
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## Description
A genre-defying novel—part science fiction, part social realism—from one of the most powerful voices in New Zealand literature today. A spaceship called Audition 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. Pip Adam’s transcendent new novel sets its eye firmly on our current justice system and asks what happens when those in power decide someone takes up too much room?

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## Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction Shortlist 2026

### Here’s the shortlist for this year:
1. **_Audition_ by Pip Adam** (Coffee House Press, June 10, 2025)
   - Three rom-com quoting MCs travel from incarceration to exile to a place beyond punishment. _Audition_ explores carceral politics and the psychology of violence, and what healing from the harm of those systems might require in a world where embodiment and identity have lost all familiar forms.
2. **_Sunward_ by William Alexander** (Saga Press. Sept 16, 2025)
   - What if robots needed to be raised? Weaving comedy with a vision of parental care that encompasses beings built as well as born, Alexander considers caretaking and community alongside power and resistance.
3. **_Call and Response_ by Christopher Caldwell**(Neon Hemlock, Oct 14, 2025)
   - Caldwell's speculative and fantastical stories are grounded in the realities, dreams, struggles, and relationships that animate queer lives.
4. **_Midnight Timetable_ by Bora Chung**, translated by **Anton Hur** (Algonquin, Sept 4, 2025)
   - This novel in ghost stories gently suggests the degree to which humanity’s efforts to control the world are themselves figments and fantasies.
5. **_The Works of Vermin_ by Hiron Ennes** (Tor Books, Oct 14, 2025)
   - This story of revolution takes place in a city riddled with strange vermin, their exterminators, and a wealthy ruling class.
6. **_Notes from a Regicide_ by Isaac Fellman** (Tor Books, April 15, 2025)
   - A multilayered, intimate history of two generations of trans characters in a distant future.
7. **_Mad Sisters of Esi_ by Tashan Mehta** (DAW Books, Sept 9, 2023)
   - Using myth, fictional scholarship, alchemy, folktales, and animism.
8. **_One Message Remains_ by Premee Mohamed** (Psychopomp, Feb 11, 2025)
   - Four loosely connected tales exploring life during wartime and occupation.
9. **_Slow Gods_ by Claire North** (Orbit, Nov 18, 2025)
   - A galaxy-spanning space opera exploring the fraught roles of power and love as a series of worlds face destruction.