Word Count: 688 | Reading Time: 3 min
It gives us immense pleasure to announce that Vajra Chandrasekera’s spellbinding Rakesfall has just been awarded the prestigious 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. Chandrasekera has been an ardent supporter of both Tasavvurnama and the Salam Award, our sister organization that works to promote speculative fiction writing in Pakistan. The prestigious Ursula K. Le Guin Prize is an annual cash prize bestowed for a single work of imaginative fiction and is a once in a lifetime award. Their official website also elaborates:
This award is intended to recognize those writers Ursula spoke of in her 2014 National Book Awards speech—realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now.
On this monumental occasion, we had the pleasure and privilege of sitting down with Vajra for a short Q&A. Here’s what the author had to say:
Firstly, our heartiest congratulations on the win! How does it feel? Any plans to celebrate?
It feels wonderful! The Le Guin Prize is a relatively young award, but it has quickly established itself as one of the major awards to watch in speculative literature, and I’m incredibly happy to be part of it.
In your acceptance speech, you spoke about Rakesfall being a book about power and the limitless desire of the powerful to hoard more. You also rightfully spoke about how this very much mirrors the world we live in today. My question is, when and where did the seeds of this story first germinate? Was there any particular real-life incident that sparked the core concept?
Many real-life incidents do make it into my books, especially the most absurd and fantastical encounters with the law, the police, the paperwork, the bureaucracy, the state. But also, the grandmothers. The grandmothers are always real.
I know authors are not supposed to play favorites but between Rakesfall and Saint of Bright Doors, which one was more fun to write?
Oh, it was absolutely Rakesfall. I had a lot more trouble putting Saint together, because it was my first novel and I was still figuring out how to write a novel, and in addition to that it had to bear the burden of all my anxieties about a first novel—about whether I could even get an agent with the manuscript, whether I could sell it to a publisher, how it would be received by readers and critics, whether it would sell well enough to allow me to have a career as a writer. With all this in my head, I put a lot of constraints on myself in writing Saint. But with Rakesfall, which I began writing at the end of the same year that I finished writing Saint, I allowed myself to enjoy it more, to relax about all the industry and commercial stuff that turns out to be completely out of your hands anyway, to be more playful, to dismantle at least some of the containment I’d constructed around what was and wasn’t allowed. So that was a joyful experience.
What are you presently working on? Is there a new book in the making and when can readers expect it?
There are actually at least three new novels in the making. Two are already written and at various stages of edits: one of those two will be my third novel from Tor, though I’m late enough with the manuscript that I don’t know if it will be out in ’26 or ’27. The third is the project I’m currently working on as one of the 2025-2026 Fellows of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, which has been wonderful so far and I’m really taking the opportunity to dig into their archives for historical research. That book I’ve barely started. Plus, I’m trying to put together a collection of short stories as well. So all that will account for the next several years of my life!
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Once again, we’d like to offer our heartiest congratulations to Vajra Chandrasekera. We cannot wait to read more of him! 