Indian writer Tashan Mehta’s novel The Mad Sisters of Esi has been shortlisted for the 2026 Ursula K Le Guin Prize for Fiction. The annual $25,000 cash prize is given to a writer for a single work of imaginative fiction. This award is intended to recognise writers who are “realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now.”

The Prize website noted how Mehta’s novel “[uses] myth, fictional scholarship, alchemy, folktales, and animism to create a quantum form of storytelling that follows the relationship between two sets of sisters, generations and worlds apart. Mad Sisters of Esi builds upon itself, layer by rich narrative layer, weaving together an all-encompassing saga of grief, love, legacy, and creation.” The book was published in the subcontinent by HarperCollins India in 2023.

This year, the nine shortlisted books were chosen by the Ursula K Le Guin Foundation following a public nomination process. The jury comprises authors Nicola Griffith, Mat Johnson, Fonda Lee, Darcie Little Badger, and Peter Rock. The winner will be announced on October 21.

The other books on the shortlist are:

• Audition, Pip Adam

• Sunward, William Alexander

• Call and Response, Christopher Caldwell

• Midnight Timetable: A Novel in Ghost Stories, Bora Chung, translated from the Korean by Anton Hur

• The Works of Vermin, Hiron Ennes

• Notes from a...

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