Ursula Le Guin Biography and List of Works

American writer of science fiction and fantasy. Le Guin's fame has extended beyond the genre boundaries. Her thought-provoking novels include The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, as did The Dispossessed (1974). Her celebrated Earthsea books, which were written for young adults, have been compared to C.S. Lewis's Narnia chronicles and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Le Guin has won several Hugo and Nebula Awards for her short fiction, and the National book award for children's literature for her novel The Farthest Shore (1972), part of her Earthsea trilogy.

'Somebody asked me if I'd heard that there were immortal people on the Yendian Plane, and somebody else told me that there were, so when I go there, I asked about them. The travel agent rather reluctantly showed me a place called the Island of the Immortals on her map. "You don't want to go there," she said.
   "I don't?"
   "Well, it's dangerous," she said, looking at me as if she thought I was not the danger-loving type, in which she was entirely correct.'
(from 'The Island of the Immortals,' in The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction, ed. by Gardner Dozois, 1999)

Ursula K. Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, the daughter of Dr Alfred and Theodora Kroeber Quinn. Her mother was a writer of children's stories, and father was the head of UC-Berkeley's Department of Anthropology who published work on Native Americans. Le Guin grew up in an academic atmosphere, and her parents taught her about myths and legends from around the world. She attended Radcliffe College, receiving her B.A. in 1951 and her master's degree in romance languages from Columbia University in 1952. Her thesis dealt with Romance Literatures of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, particularly French.

Le Guin studied on a Fulbright scholarship in France where she met Charles Le Guin, a historian. They married in 1953. Le Guin was an instructor in French at Mercer University, Georgia, in 1954 and at University of Idaho, Moscow, in 1956. In 1954 she was a department secretary at Emory University, Atlanta. Le Guin taught writing at Pacific University, Forest Grove (1971), University of Washington, Seattle (1971-73), Portland State University, Oregon (1974, 1977, 1979), in Melbourne, Australia (1975), at the University of Reading, England (1976), Indiana Writers Conference, Bloomington (1978, 1983), University of California, San Diego (1979), Kenyon College, and Tulane University.

Among Le Guin's several awards are five Hugos (1970, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1988) and Gandalf Award (1979), Nebulas (1969, 1974, 1974, 1990, 1995), Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for fiction (1986), a Pushcart Prize (1991), a National Book Award (1973), a Newberry Silver Medal (1972), and Harold D. Vursell Award (1991).

Le Guin made her debut as a novelist in 1966 with Rocannon's World. Her first fantasy tale, "April in Paris," was published in Amazing Stories in 1962. In the story figures from different historical periods travel to 15th-century Paris to meet and marry. Rocannon's World was set in the Hainish universe, which is unified by her concept that an ancient civilization "seeded" the habitable worlds. The descendants of people from the planet Hain, remotely related forms of humanoids, inhabit our part of the Galaxy. The series, which spans 2500 years of future history, continued in Planet of Exile (1966), City of Illusions (1967), and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which won both Hugo and Nebula awards. Four Ways to Forgiveness (1997) was comprised of four Hainish connected novellas. The fifth novel in the Hainish sequence, The Dispossessed (1974), is considered among Le Guin's best works.

"Oh, damn. She liked the young, and there was always something to learn from a foreigner, but she was tired of being on view. She learned from them, but they didn't learn from her; they had learnt all she had to teach long ago, from her books, from the Movement. They just came to look, as if she were the Great Tower in Rodarred, or the Canyon of the Tulaevea. A phenomenon, a monument."
(from 'The Day Before the Revolution', the Nebula Award in 1974)

Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy, A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971), and The Farthest Shore (1972), received wide critical attention. The protagonist is Ged, also called Sparrohawk, whom the reader meets as a young magician at the height of his powers, and as the aging Archmage in the third part. After an interval of nearly twenty years, Le Guinn published the last book of the series, Ethane, in 1990.

The story is set on an archipelago on an ocean world. Ged releases into the world a nameless shadow, an evil power from the realm of the dead, which he must chase and battle to the ends of the earth. In the encounter he finds out that it bears his own name. In the second part Ged is seeking the missing half of a talismanic ring. He is captured and entombed in an underground labyrinth, where the young High Priestess Arha, also called Tenar, has devoted herself to death. Ged must persuade her to choose life to save himself and the world. The Farthest Shore depicts GED and his companion's, a future King, quest to find out why the power of all the magicians in the world is failing. They encounter a corrupt magician who has made a hole in the barrier between life and death. Ged closes the hole, but loses his powers as a magus.

Le Guin's work reflected the Taoist principle of mutuality (as in yin and yang), interdependence, and ordered wholeness. In A Wizard of Earthsea she examined the Jungian concept of shadow, representing those aspects of the self, which have been denied. Also in her essay "The Child and the Shadow" (1975) Le Guinn has argued the importance of understanding of the Shadow. In Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea the struggle between good and evil continues but on a more realistic level. It also rejected male centred heroism as a result of feminist critique. This time the central character is the aging Tenar. She is fostering a damaged child, her adopted daughter. Ged and Tenar's relationship is developed further, and at last they consummate their love.

The Left Hand of Darkness used ambisexual aliens to comment on human sexual mores. Genly Ai is an emissary from the human galaxy to a snow-bound planet, Gethen, whose people are androgynous. They have the capability of becoming either male or female at the peak of their sexual cycle. During a long journey across the ice, Genly Ai finally understands his Gethenian companion, and rethinks his attitudes and the nature of sex.

In The Dispossessed the values of an anarchist world, Anarres, are contrasted with those of a primarily capitalist planet. Anarres is a barren, small moon, from which the hero, an Anarresti physicist Shevek, starts his journey to Urras, the mother planet. Shevek tries to develop a general theory of Time, in an attempt to re-unite the estranged societies. Shevek is not completely at home in either society, but after finishing his work he returns to Anarres, seeing that it's era of cultural isolation is coming to end.

Critics who are not friends of fantasy or science fiction have praised the quality of Le Guin's work. In her writing guide, Steering the Craft (1998), she challenges the general opinion to conflate story with conflict, although the writing process, discovering, finding, losing, could lead to it. The role of the narrative sentence is to lead to the next sentence and to keep the story going. In The Telling (2000), which continues her Hainish cycle, Le Guin tells the story of the spiritual pilgrimage of a woman, Sutty, who studies the culture of a remote mountain region on a planet ruled by a dictatorial Corporation.

For further reading: The Farthest Shores of Ursula K. Le Guin by George Edgar Slusser (1976); Ursula K. Le Guin by Joseph D. Olander and Martin H. Greenberg (1979); Ursula K. Le Guin by Joseph W. De Bolt (1979); Ursula K. Le Guin by Barbara J. Bucknall (1981); Approaches to the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin by James Bittner (1984); Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin by Elizabeth Cummins Cogell (1990); The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, ed. by John Clute and Peter Nicholls (1993); Presenting Ursula K. Le Guin by Suzanne Elizabeth Reid (1997); Dancing with Dragons by Donna R. White (1999)

Planet of Exile, (1966)