The Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation has announced that The Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur, has been shortlisted for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.
The prize annually awards $25,000 to ‘the author of a book who best represents the legendary writer’s literary, moral, and aesthetic ideals: “realists of a larger reality, who can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now.”’
The winner will be announced on the 21st of October.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 URSULA K. LE GUIN PRIZE
A FINALIST FOR THE LOCUS AWARD FOR BEST TRANSLATED NOVEL
Equal parts bone-chilling, wryly funny, and deeply political, The Midnight Timetable is a masterful work of literary horror from one of our time’s greatest imaginations.
In a labyrinthine research facility, where those who open the wrong door might find it’s disappeared behind them or that the echoing footsteps they’re running from are their own, an unnamed protagonist begins their night shift under the watchful eye of the building’s enigmatic senior guard.
Each evening, as the fluorescent lights hum and the silence grows heavier, the guard shares another tale of cursed objects and lives unspooled by vengeance, sorrow, or revelation. But these are not mere ghost stories. They’re warnings. Lessons. Or, perhaps, confessions ...
As the nights stretch on and reality frays, our protagonist starts to suspect that the building itself is alive with malevolent intent and that the objects they guard aren’t just cursed.
They’re waiting. Watching.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE AND WINNER OF A PEN/HEIM TRANSLATION GRANT.
A woman is haunted by her own bodily waste. A pregnant woman is told she must find a father for her unborn baby or face horrific consequences. A young monster, forced to fight, discovers the extent of his power.
This genre-defying collection of short stories blurs the lines between magical realism, horror, and science fiction. Using elements of the fantastic and surreal, Chung exposes the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society, gliding effortlessly from terrifying to wryly humorous in a skilful translation by the acclaimed Anton Hur.
Test for no-sync function.
By the internationally acclaimed author of Cursed Bunny, in another thrilling translation from the Korean by Anton Hur, Your Utopia is full of tales of loss and discovery, idealism and dystopia, death and immortality. “Nothing concentrates the mind like Chung’s terrors, which will shrivel you to a bouillon cube of your most primal instincts” (Vulture), yet these stories are suffused with Chung's inimitable wry humour and surprisingly tender moments, too — often between unexpected subjects.
In ‘The Center for Immortality Research’, a low-level employee runs herself ragged planning a fancy gala for donors, only to be blamed for a crime she witnessed during the event, under the noses of the mysterious celebrity benefactors hoping to live forever. But she can’t be fired — no one can. In ‘A Song for Sleep’, a tender, one-sided love blooms in the AI-elevator of an apartment complex; as in, the elevator develops a profound affection for one of the residents. In ‘Seeds’, we see the final frontier of capitalism’s destruction of the planet and the GMO companies who rule the agricultural industry in this bleak future, but nature has ways of creeping back to life.
Chung’s writing is “haunting, funny, gross, terrifying — and yet when we reach the end, we just want more” (Alexander Chee). If you haven’t yet experienced the fruits of this singular imagination, Your Utopia is waiting.
Bora Chung is a writer of speculative fiction and a translator of contemporary Russian and Polish literature. She has published three full-length novels and four short story collections in Korean. As of 2025, five of her works have been translated by Anton Hur and published in English; the first, Cursed Bunny, was shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize and the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature.
