Khadija Abdalla Bajaber won the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for her novel The House of Rust, becoming the first author honored with the new award for a work of imaginative fiction.
Bajaber’s novel, which was also the inaugural winner of the Graywolf Press Africa Prize, follows a girl from Kenya who goes to sea with a talking cat to search for her missing father, a fisherman. A critic for Kirkus called the book “an adventure tale rife with creatures and immersed in the Hadrami culture of Kenya.”
The jury for the Le Guin prize wrote of the book, “Scene after scene is gleaming, textured, utterly devoid of
cliché and arresting in its wisdom. The novel’s structure is audacious and its use of language is to die for.”
The new $25,000 award, named after the legendary science fiction and fantasy author who died in 2018, was announced last year and is given to an author who “can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now.”
The prize jury—composed of writers adrienne maree brown, Becky Chambers, Molly Gloss, David Mitchell, and Luis Alberto Urrea—also honored two finalists for the award: How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu and The Past is Red by Catherynne M. Valente.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
