Ursula Le Guin biography

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born on the 21st October 1929 in California and is an American author of novels, poetry and short stories. She has won numerous awards during her distinguished career, notably the Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master award in 2003.

It is with Le Guin's fantasy series Earthsea that we will concentrate. In 1968, A Wizard of Earthsea was published and this was followed by The Tombs of Atuan in 1971, and The Farthest Shore in 1972. In 1990, Ursula Le Guin came back to the series with Tehanu. These four books now make up a new publication entitled The Earthsea Quartet. The Other Wind, published in 2001 completes the novels of Earthsea. A number of short stories also bridge gaps between the main novels. The Word of Unbinding and The Rule of Names (1975), plus Dragonfly and The Tales of Earthsea (2001) are all vital reading for all Earthsea fans.

There are strong themes of sociology and anthropology running through Ursula Le Guin's work and her attention to detail has been a factor in the worldwide popularity of her work.

Ursula Le Guin describes her working day as not thrilling in anyone else's eyes but one full of passion, excitement, anxiety, joy and grief to her.

The dark, dry, changeless world after death of Earthsea comes (in so far as I am conscious of its sources) from the Greco-Roman idea of Hades' realm, from certain images in Dante, and from one of Rilke's Elegies. A realm of shadow, dust, where nothing changes and "lovers pass each other in silence" - it seems a fairly common way of thinking about what personal existence after death would be, not a specifically modern one?

From: Ursula Le Guin being interviewed by The Guardian

The word feminist has often been thrown at Ursula Le Guin and at her books but in reality this very far from the truth. She simply makes the female characters in her books as important as the male's and ensures that they are characters and not stereotypes.

Ursula Le Guin has three children and four grandchildren and has lived in Portland since 1958. She wrote her first story at the age of eleven before earning a Bachelor of Arts from Radcliffe College and a Master of Arts from Columbia University. Later, studying in France she met her future husband Charles Le Guin.

When asked for her opinion on the Harry Potter novel, she said that she found the first Harry Potter book to be a "lively kid's fantasy crossed with a 'school novel'" but also found it "stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited." It has been said that "Rowling can type, but Le Guin can write."

Within my field of work—imaginative fiction—I think I have had an appreciable effect on the representation of gender and of "race," specifically skin color. When I came into the field, the POV was totally male-centric and everybody was white. At first I wrote that way too. In science fiction, I joined the feminist movement when it reawoke in the late Sixties, early Seventies, and we did away with the squeaking Barbies and began to write actual women characters. In fantasy, my heroes were colored people when, as far as I know, nobody else's were. (And yet I still fight, every single fantasy jacket-cover, to get them represented as nonwhite).

From: Ursula Le Guin on Anarchism, Writing

Ursula Le Guin awards

  • National Book Award for The Farthest Shore
  • Nebula Award for Tehanu
  • Endeavour Award for The Tales from Earthsea

"Earthsea ... has made her name spell enchantment, gentle terror and pleasure to children and adults alike." Independent on Sunday

"We are ready for new parables, and here they are; we are in need of great adventures to lift us out of self and here, in these breath-taking fantasies, we find them." The Times Educational Supplement

All Ursula Le Guin Reviews