Ursula K Le Guin Prize Shortlist 2026

The shortlist for this year's Ursula K Le Guin Award has been announced, and I'm once again planning to try and read them all before the prize is awarded in October. (I previously read all of the 2024 prize, and you can find those posts here. I didn't get a chance to read last year's shortlist.) I say this every time I write about a shortlist, but one of the things I love about reading awards is that it exposes me to books I hadn't previously heard of and encourages me to read things that wouldn't normally appeal to me. The only book on this shortlist that I was previously aware of is Claire North's Slow Gods, which has been on my reading list for a while. I'm not aware of any of the others, and if I'm being honest the majority of them don't sound like books I'd usually pick up and read. The two that I definitely would read and that sound like they're very much my shit are Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur, and Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta. Whether I read…