Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin at a bookstore Q&A session, July 2004
Born	(1929-10-21) October 21, 1929 (age 82) Berkeley, California, United States
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	American
Genres	Science fiction fantasy
Influences Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, Leo Tolstoy,[1] J.R.R. Tolkien,[2] Jack Vance,[3] Carl Jung,[2] Tao Te Ching, William Shakespeare,[4] Virgil, The Brontë sisters,[5] Philip K. Dick, Zhuangzi, Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Norse mythology,[6] Greek mythology[2]
Influenced Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link,[1] Susanna Clarke, Iain Banks, Hayao Miyazaki, Paolo Bacigalupi
www.ursulakleguin.com

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin ( /ˈɜrsələ ˈkroʊbər ləˈɡwɪn/; born October 21, 1929) is an American author. She has written novels, children's books, and short stories, mainly in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. She has also written poetry and essays.

First published in the 1960s, the particular interest of her work is exploring alternative imaginings of sexuality, religion, politics, anarchism, ethnography and gender. She is influenced by the central figures Western literature, including feminist writers like Virginia Woolf, but also by modern fantasy and science fiction writers, Norse mythology, and books from the Eastern tradition such as the Tao Te Ching.

In turn, she has had an influence on Booker prize winners and shortlisters like Salman Rushdie and David Mitchell and notable writers of futurism and fantasy such as Neil Gaiman and Iain Banks. She has won awards such as the Hugo, Nebula, Locus and World Fantasy Award multiple times.

Life[link]

Ursula Le Guin (then named Ursula Kroeber) was born and raised in Berkeley, California, the daughter of anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber and writer Theodora Kroeber. In 1901, Le Guin's father earned the first Ph.D. in anthropology in the United States from Columbia University and went on to found the second department, at the University of California, Berkeley.^[7] Theodora Kroeber's biography of her husband, Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration, is a good source for Le Guin's early years and for the biographical elements in her late works, especially her interest in social anthropology. She attended Berkeley High School with science fiction writer Philip K. Dick.

Le Guin received her B.A. (Phi Beta Kappa) from Radcliffe College in 1951, and M.A. from Columbia University in 1952. She later studied in France, where she met her husband, the historian Charles Le Guin. They were married in 1953.

She became interested in literature when she was young. At the age of eleven, she submitted her first story to the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. It was rejected.^[8] Her earliest writings, some of which she adapted to include in Orsinian Tales and Malafrena, were non-fantastic stories of imaginary countries. Searching for a way to express her interests, she returned to her early interest in science fiction and in the early 1960s began to be published regularly. She received wide recognition for her novel The Left Hand of Darkness, which won the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1970. Her subsequent novel The Dispossessed made her the first person to win both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel twice for the same two books.

In later years, Le Guin did work in film and audio. She contributed to The Lathe of Heaven, a 1979 PBS film based on her novel of the same name. In 1985, she collaborated with avant-garde composer David Bedford on the libretto of Rigel 9, a space opera.

In May 1983, Le Guin delivered a well-received commencement address entitled "A Left Handed Commencement Address" in Mills College, Oakland, California.^[9] "A Left Handed Commencement Address" is included in her nonfiction collection Dancing at the Edge of the World.

In December 2009, Le Guin resigned from the Authors Guild in protest over its endorsement of Google's book digitization project. "You decided to deal with the devil," she wrote in her resignation letter. "There are principles involved, above all the whole concept of copyright; and these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle."^[10][11]

Le Guin has lived in Portland, Oregon since 1958. She has three children.

Awards[link]

Le Guin has received five Hugo awards and six Nebula awards,^[12] and was awarded the Gandalf Grand Master award in 1979 and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Award in 2003. She received nineteen Locus Awards for her fiction, more than any other author.^[13] The World Fantasy Awards presented her with Lifetime Achievement in 1995.^[14] Her novel The Farthest Shore won the 1973 National Book Award in category Children's Books.^[15]

Le Guin was the Professional Guest of Honor at the 1975 World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne, Australia. She received the Library of Congress Living Legends award in the "Writers and Artists" category in April 2000 for her significant contributions to America's cultural heritage.^[16] The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. In 2004, Le Guin was the recipient of the Association for Library Service to Children's May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award and the Margaret Edwards Award. She was honored by The Washington Center for the Book for her distinguished body of work with the Maxine Cushing Gray Fellowship for Writers on October 18, 2006.^[17]

Le Guin was one of three finalists for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her work Unlocking the Air and Other Stories.^[18]

In 2002, Le Guin received the PEN/Malamud Award for "excellence in a body of short fiction."^[19]

At their 2009 convention, the Freedom From Religion Foundation awarded the “Emperor Has No Clothes” award to Le Guin.^[20] The FFRF describes the award as "celebrating 'plain speaking' on the shortcomings of religion by public figures".^[21]

Influences[link]

When asked about her influences, she replied; "Once I learned to read, I read everything. I read all the famous fantasies -- Alice in Wonderland, and Wind in the Willows, and Kipling. I adored Kipling's Jungle Book. And then when I got older I found Lord Dunsany. He opened up a whole new world -- the world of pure fantasy. And ... Worm Ouroboros. Again, pure fantasy. Very, very fattening. And then my brother and I blundered into science fiction when I was 11 or 12. Early Asimov, things like that. But that didn't have too much effect on me. It wasn't until I came back to science fiction and discovered Sturgeon -- but particularly Cordwainer Smith. ... I read the story "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard," and it just made me go, "Wow! This stuff is so beautiful, and so strange, and I want to do something like that."^[22]

Themes[link]

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Much of Le Guin's science fiction places a strong emphasis on the social sciences, including sociology and anthropology, thus placing it in the subcategory commonly known as soft science fiction.^[23] Le Guin has objected to this classification of her writing, expressing her distaste for the divisiveness of the term and its implication of what constitutes valid science fiction.^[8]

A distinguishing characteristic of Le Guin's work is her deliberate treatment of race. The majority of Le Guin's main characters are people of color, a choice made to reflect the non-white majority of humans, and one to which she attributes the frequent lack of character illustrations on her book covers.^[24] Her writing often makes use of alien cultures to convey a message about human culture in general. An example is the exploration of sexual identity through an unpredictably androgynous race in The Left Hand of Darkness. Such themes can place her work in the category of feminist science fiction,^[25] but not necessarily so. Her works are often concerned with ecological issues.

In her writing, Le Guin makes use of the ordinary actions and transactions of everyday life. For example, in 'Tehanu' it is central to the story that the main characters are concerned with the everyday business of looking after animals, tending gardens and doing domestic chores. While she has often used otherworldly perspectives to explore political and cultural themes, she has also written fiction set much closer to home; many of her short stories are set in our world in the present or near future.

Several of Le Guin's science fiction works, including her novels The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, belong to her Hainish Cycle, which details a future, galactic civilization loosely connected by an organizational body known as the Ekumen. Many of these works deal with the consequences of contact between different worlds and cultures. The Ekumen serves as a framework in which to stage these interactions.^{[citation needed]} For example, the novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Telling deal with the consequences of the arrival of Ekumen envoys (known as "mobiles") on remote planets and the culture shock that ensues.

Unlike those in much mainstream science fiction, none of the civilizations Le Guin depicts possess reliable faster-than-light travel, with the exception of unmanned FTL monitors and bombers. Instead, Le Guin created the ansible, a device that allows instantaneous communication up to 120 light years. The term and concept have been subsequently borrowed by several other well-known authors.^[26]

Adaptations of her work[link]

Few of Le Guin's major works have been adapted for film or television. Her 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven has been adapted twice: first in 1980 by thirteen/WNET New York, with her own participation, and again in 2002 by the A&E Network. In a 2008 interview, Le Guin said that she considers the 1980 adaptation as "the only good adaptation to film" of her work to date.^[8]

In the early 1980s animator and director Hayao Miyazaki asked permission to create an animated adaptation of Earthsea. However, Le Guin, who was unfamiliar with his work and anime in general, turned down the offer. Years later, after seeing My Neighbour Totoro, she reconsidered her refusal, believing that if anyone should be allowed to direct an Earthsea film, it should be Hayao Miyazaki.^[27] The third and fourth Earthsea books were used as the basis of the 2006 animated film Tales from Earthsea (ゲド戦記, Gedo Senki^?). The film, however, was directed by Miyazaki's son, Goro, rather than Hayao Miyazaki himself, which came as a disappointment to Le Guin. While she was positive about the aesthetic of the film, writing that "much of it was beautiful,"^[27] she took great issue with its re-imagining of the moral sense of the books and greater focus on physical violence. "...evil has been comfortably externalized in a villain," Le Guin writes, "the wizard Kumo/Cob, who can simply be killed, thus solving all problems. In modern fantasy (literary or governmental), killing people is the usual solution to the so-called war between good and evil. My books are not conceived in terms of such a war, and offer no simple answers to simplistic questions."^[27]

In 1987, the CBC Radio anthology program Vanishing Point adapted The Dispossessed into a series of six 30 minute episodes,^[28] and at an unspecified date The Word for World Is Forest as a series of three 30 minute episodes.^[29]

In 2004 the Sci Fi Channel adapted the first two books of the Earthsea trilogy as the miniseries Legend of Earthsea. Le Guin was highly critical of the adaptation, calling it a "far cry from the Earthsea I envisioned", objecting both to the use of white actors for her red, brown, or black-skinned characters, and to the way she was "cut out of the process".^[30]

Her novella Paradises Lost, published in The Birthday of the World: and Other Stories, has been adapted into an opera by the American composer Stephen Andrew Taylor. The opera premiered April 26, 2012 at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts on the campus of the University of Illinois.

Select bibliography[link]

Ursula K. Le Guin has written fiction and nonfiction works for audiences including children, adults and scholars. Her most notable works are listed here.

Earthsea fantasy series^[31]

• A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968 (Lewis Carroll Shelf Award winner, 1979)
• The Tombs of Atuan, 1971 (Newbery Honor winner, 1972)
• The Farthest Shore, 1972 (National Book Award winner, 1973)^[15]
• Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea, 1990 (Nebula Award winner, 1990;^[32] Locus Fantasy Award winner, 1991^[33])
• Tales from Earthsea, 2001 (Short Stories)
• The Other Wind, 2001 (World Fantasy Award winner, 2002^[34])

Hainish science fiction series^[35]

• Rocannon's World, 1966
• Planet of Exile, 1966
• City of Illusions, 1967
• The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969 (winner of the Hugo Award, 1969^[36] and Nebula Award, 1970^[37])
• The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, 1974 (Nebula Award winner, 1974;^[38] Hugo and Locus Awards winner, 1975^[39])
• The Word for World is Forest, 1976 (winner of the Hugo Award for best novella)
• Four Ways to Forgiveness, 1995 (Four Stories of the Ekumen)
• The Telling, 2000 (Locus SF Award winner, 2001;^[40] Endeavour Award winner)

Miscellaneous

• The Lathe of Heaven, 1971 (made into TV movies, 1980 and 2002; Locus SF Award winner, 1972^[41])
• The Wind's Twelve Quarters, 1975
• Orsinian Tales, 1976
• The Eye of the Heron, 1978 (first published in the anthology Millennial Women)
• The Beginning Place, 1980 (also published as Threshold, 1986)
• The Compass Rose, 1982
• Always Coming Home, 1985
• Lavinia, 2008 (Locus Fantasy Award winner, 2009)^[42]

Footnotes[link]

References[link]

• Bernardo, Susan (2006). Ursula K. Le Guin: A Critical Companion (1st ed.). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 
• Bloom, Harold, ed., "Ursula K. Leguin: Modern Critical Views" (Chelsea House Publications, 2000)
• Brown, Joanne, & St. Clair, Nancy, Declarations of Independence: Empowered Girls in Young Adult Literature, 1990–2001 (Lanham, MD, & London: The Scarecrow Press, 2002 [Scarecrow Studies in Young Adult Literature, No. 7])
• Cadden, Mike (2005). Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre: Fiction for Children and Adults (1st ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. 
• Cart, Michael, From Romance to Realism: 50 Years of Growth and Change in Young Adult Literature (New York: HarperCollins, 1996)
• Cummins, Elizabeth, Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin, rev. ed., (Columbia, SC: Univ of South Carolina Press, 1993). ISBN 0-87249-869-7.
• Davis, Laurence & Peter Stillman, eds, The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Dispossessed" (New York: Lexington Books, 2005)
• Erlich, Richard D. Coyote's Song: The Teaching Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin (1997). Digital publication of the Science Fiction Research Association (2001 f.):[2]
• Egoff, Sheila, Stubbs, G. T., & Ashley, L. F., eds, Only Connect: Readings on Children’s Literature (Toronto & New York: Oxford University Press, 1969; 2nd ed., 1980; 3rd ed., 1996)
• Egoff, Sheila A., Worlds Within: Children’s Fantasy from the Middle Ages to Today (Chicago & London: American Library Association, 1988)
• Lehr, Susan, ed., Battling Dragons: Issues and Controversy in Children’s Literature (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995)
• Lennard, John, Of Modern Dragons and other essays on Genre Fiction (Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007)
• Reginald, Robert, & Slusser, George, eds, Zephyr and Boreas: Winds of Change in the Fictions of Ursula K. Le Guin (San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1997)
• Rochelle, Warren G., Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001)
• Sullivan III, C. W., ed., Young Adult Science Fiction (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999 [Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 79])
• Trites, Roberta Seelinger, Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000)
• Wayne, Kathryn Ross, Redefining Moral Education: Life, Le Guin, and Language (Lanham, MD: Austin & Winfield, 1995)
• White, Donna R., Dancing with Dragons: Ursula K. Le Guin and the Critics (Ontario: Camden House, 1998 [Literary Criticism in Perspective])

External links[link]

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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ursula K. Le Guin

• Official website
• Ursula K. Le Guin biography at the Science Fiction Hall of Fame
• Ursula K. Le Guin at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Le Guin reviews, synopses, and cover art at Fantasy Literature

Interviews

• An audio interview with Ursula K. Le Guin (MP3 format) from Hour 25
• Interview in The Guardian December 17, 2005
• Radio Interview with Ursula LeGuin on Bookworm
• Audio interview with Le Guin at National Review Online