Ursula K. Le Guin

Childhood and education , with Ishi, the last of the Yahi people (1911) Ursula Kroeber was born in Berkeley, California, on October 21, 1929. Her father, Alfred Louis Kroeber, was an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Le Guin's mother, Theodora Kroeber (born Theodora Covel Kracaw), had a graduate degree in psychology, but turned to writing in her 60s, developing a successful career as an author. Among her works was Ishi in Two Worlds (1961), a biographical volume about Ishi, an Indigenous American who had been studied by Alfred Kroeber. Ishi was the last known member of the Yahi tribe after the rest of its members died or were killed by white colonizers. Le Guin had three older brothers: Karl, who became a literary scholar, Theodore, and Clifton. The family had a large book collection, and the siblings all became interested in reading while they were young. The Kroeber family had a number of visitors, including well-known academics such as Robert Oppenheimer; Le Guin would later use Oppenheimer as the model for Shevek, the physicist protagonist of The Dispossessed. The family divided its time between a home in Napa Valley during the summer and a house in Berkeley during the academic year. Le Guin's reading included science fiction and fantasy: she and her siblings often read issues of Thrilling Wonder Stories and Astounding Science Fiction. She was fond of myths and legends, particularly Norse mythology, and of Native American legends that her father would narrate. Other authors who she enjoyed were Lord Dunsany and Lewis Padgett. In addition to reading, Le Guin also developed an early interest in writing; she wrote a short story when she was nine, and submitted her first short story to Astounding Science Fiction when she was 11. The piece was rejected, and she did not submit anything else for another 10 years. Le Guin attended Berkeley High School. From 1947 to 1951 she took a Bachelor of Arts degree in Renaissance French and Italian literature from Radcliffe College of Harvard University, graduating as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. As a child she had been interested in biology and poetry, but had been limited in her choice of career by her difficulties with mathematics. Le Guin undertook graduate studies at Columbia University, and earned a Master of Arts degree in French in 1952. Soon after, she began working towards a PhD, and won a Fulbright grant to continue her studies in France from 1953 to 1954. Married life and death In 1953, while traveling to France aboard the Queen Mary, Ursula met historian Charles Le Guin. They married in Paris in December 1953. According to Le Guin, the marriage signaled the "end of the doctorate" for her. While her husband finished his doctorate at Emory University in Georgia, and later at the University of Idaho, Le Guin taught French: first at Mercer University, then at the University of Idaho after their move. She also worked as a secretary until the birth of her daughter Elisabeth in 1957. A second daughter, Caroline, was born in 1959. Also in that year, Charles became an instructor in history at Portland State University, and the couple moved to Portland, Oregon, where their son Theodore was born in 1964. They would live in Portland for the rest of their lives, although Le Guin received further Fulbright grants to travel to London in 1968 and 1975. Le Guin's writing career began in the late 1950s, but the time she spent caring for her children initially constrained her writing schedule. She would continue writing and publishing for nearly 60 years. Le Guin died on January 22, 2018, at her home in Portland, at the age of 88. Her son said that she had been in poor health for several months, and stated that she had likely suffered a heart attack. Private memorial services for her were held in Portland. A public memorial service, which included speeches by the writers Margaret Atwood, Molly Gloss, and Walidah Imarisha, was held in Portland on June 13, 2018. Views and advocacy Le Guin refused a Nebula Award for her story "The Diary of the Rose" in 1977, in protest of the Science Fiction Writers of America's revocation of Stanisław Lem's membership. Le Guin attributed the revocation to Lem's criticism of American science fiction and willingness to live in the Eastern Bloc of states, and said she felt reluctant to receive an award "for a story about political intolerance from a group that had just displayed political intolerance". Le Guin once said that she was "raised as irreligious as a jackrabbit". She expressed a deep interest in Taoism and Buddhism, saying that Taoism gave her a "handle on how to look at life" during her adolescent years. In 1997, she published a translation of the Tao Te Ching. In a speech at the 2014 National Book Awards, Le Guin criticized Amazon and the control it exerted over the publishing industry, specifically referencing Amazon's treatment of the Hachette Book Group during a dispute over ebook publication. Her speech received widespread media attention within and outside the United States, and was broadcast twice by National Public Radio. == Chronology of writings ==

Early work Le Guin's first published work was the poem "Folksong from the Montayna Province" in 1959, while her first published short story was "An die Musik", in 1961; both were set in her fictional country of Orsinia. Between 1951 and 1961 she also wrote five novels, all set in Orsinia, which were rejected by publishers on the grounds that they were inaccessible. Some of her poetry from this period was published in 1975 in the volume Wild Angels. Le Guin turned her attention to science fiction after a lengthy period of receiving rejections from publishers, knowing that there was a market for writing that could be readily classified as such. Her first professional publication was the short story "April in Paris" in 1962 in Fantastic Science Fiction, and seven other stories followed in the next few years, in Fantastic or Amazing Stories. Among them were "The Dowry of Angyar", which introduced the fictional Hainish universe, and "The Rule of Names" and "The Word of Unbinding", which introduced the world of Earthsea. These stories were largely ignored by critics. Ace Books released ''Rocannon's World'', Le Guin's first published novel, in 1966. Two more Hainish novels, Planet of Exile and City of Illusions were published in 1966 and 1967, respectively, and the three books together would come to be known as the Hainish trilogy. The first two were each published as half of an "Ace Double": two novels bound into a paperback and sold as a single low-cost volume. City of Illusions was published as a standalone volume, indicating Le Guin's growing name recognition. These books received more critical attention than Le Guin's short stories, with reviews being published in several science fiction magazines, but the critical response was still muted. The books contained many themes and ideas also present in Le Guin's better known later works, including the "archetypal journey" of a protagonist who undertakes both a physical journey and one of self-discovery, cultural contact and communication, the search for identity, and the reconciliation of opposing forces. When publishing her story "Nine Lives" in 1968, Playboy magazine asked Le Guin whether they could run the story without her full first name, to which Le Guin agreed: the story was published under the name "U. K. Le Guin". She later wrote that it was the first and only time she had experienced prejudice against her as a woman writer from an editor or publisher, and reflected that "it seemed so silly, so grotesque, that I failed to see that it was also important." In subsequent printings, the story was published under her full name. Critical attention Le Guin's next two books brought her sudden and widespread critical acclaim. A Wizard of Earthsea, published in 1968, was a fantasy novel written initially for teenagers. Le Guin had not planned to write for young adults, but was asked to write a novel targeted at this group by the editor of Parnassus Press, who saw it as a market with great potential. A coming of age story set in the fictional archipelago of Earthsea, the book received a positive reception in both the U.S. and Britain. at Westercon in Portland, Oregon (1984) Her next novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, was a Hainish universe story exploring themes of gender and sexuality on a fictional planet where humans have no fixed sex. The book was Le Guin's first to address feminist issues, and according to scholar Donna White, it "stunned the science fiction critics"; it won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards for best novel, making Le Guin the first woman to win both these awards, and earned her a number of other accolades. A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness have been described by critic Harold Bloom as Le Guin's masterpieces. She won the Hugo Award again in 1973 for The Word for World Is Forest. Also set in the Hainish universe, the story explored anarchism and utopianism. Scholar Charlotte Spivack described it as representing a shift in Le Guin's science fiction towards discussing political ideas. Several of her speculative fiction short stories, including her first published story, were anthologized in the 1975 collection ''The Wind's Twelve Quarters. The fiction of the period 1966 to 1974, which also included The Lathe of Heaven'', the Hugo Award-winning "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" and the Nebula Award-winning "The Day Before the Revolution", constitutes Le Guin's best-known body of work. Wider exploration Le Guin produced a variety of work in the second half of the 1970s. This included speculative fiction in the form of the novel The Eye of the Heron, which, according to Le Guin, may be a part of the Hainish universe. She also published Very Far Away from Anywhere Else, a realistic novel for adolescents, as well as the collection Orsinian Tales and the novel Malafrena in 1976 and 1979, respectively. Though the latter two were set in the fictional country of Orsinia, the stories were realistic fiction rather than fantasy or science fiction. The Language of the Night, a collection of essays, was released in 1979, and Le Guin published Wild Angels, a volume of poetry, in 1975. Between 1979, when she published Malafrena, and 1994, when the collection A Fisherman of the Inland Sea was released, Le Guin wrote primarily for a younger audience. In 1985 she published the experimental work Always Coming Home. She wrote 11 children's picture books, including the Catwings series, between 1979 and 1994, along with The Beginning Place, an adolescent fantasy novel, released in 1980. Four more poetry collections were published in this period, all of which were positively received. She revisited Earthsea, publishing Tehanu in 1990: coming eighteen years after The Farthest Shore, during which Le Guin's views had developed considerably, the book was grimmer in tone than the earlier works in the series, and challenged some ideas presented therein. It received critical praise, won Le Guin a third Nebula Award for Best Novel, and led to the series being recognized as works of adult literature. Later writings Le Guin returned to the Hainish Cycle in the 1990s after a lengthy hiatus with the publication of a series of short stories, beginning with "The Shobies' Story" in 1990. These stories included "Coming of Age in Karhide" (1995), which explored growing into adulthood and was set on the same planet as The Left Hand of Darkness. It was described by scholar Sandra Lindow as "so transgressively sexual and so morally courageous" that Le Guin "could not have written it in the '60s". The latter won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 2002. The volume examined unconventional ideas about gender, as well as anarchist themes. Other collections included Changing Planes, also released in 2002, while the anthologies included The Unreal and the Real (2012), and The Hainish Novels and Stories, a two-volume set of works from the Hainish universe released by the Library of America. New novels from this period included Lavinia (2008), based on a character from Virgil's Aeneid, and the Annals of the Western Shore trilogy, consisting of Gifts (2004), Voices (2006), and Powers (2007). Although Annals of the Western Shore was written for an adolescent audience, the third volume, Powers, received the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2009. In her final years, Le Guin largely turned away from fiction, and produced a number of essays, poems, and some translation. == Style and influences ==

Influences Le Guin read both classic and speculative fiction widely in her youth. She later said that science fiction did not have much impact on her until she read the works of Theodore Sturgeon and Cordwainer Smith, and that she had sneered at the genre as a child. She also considered J. R. R. Tolkien and Leo Tolstoy to be stylistic influences, and preferred reading Virginia Woolf and Jorge Luis Borges to well-known science-fiction authors such as Robert Heinlein, whose writing she described as being of the "white man conquers the universe" tradition. Several scholars state that the influence of mythology, which Le Guin enjoyed reading as a child, is also visible in much of her work: for example, the short story "The Dowry of Angyar" is described as a retelling of a Norse myth. The discipline of cultural anthropology had a powerful influence on Le Guin's writing. Her father Alfred Kroeber is considered a pioneer in the field, and was a director of the University of California Museum of Anthropology: as a consequence of his research, Le Guin was exposed to anthropology and cultural exploration as a child. In addition to myths and legends, she read such volumes as The Leaves of the Golden Bough by Elizabeth Grove Frazer, a children's book adapted from The Golden Bough, a study of myth and religion by her husband James George Frazer. She described living with her father's friends and acquaintances as giving her the experience of the other. has been seen as an example of the Shadow archetype from Jungian psychology, representing Ged's pride, fear, and desire for power. Other Jungian archetypes, including the Mother, Animus, and Anima, have also been identified in Le Guin's writing. The sentient planetary forests featured in her novella The Word for World Is Forest and the short story "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" have been described as a metaphor for the mind, and of the Jungian "collective unconscious". In a 1974 lecture Le Guin discussed her interpretation of the shadow archetype in the work of other writers, and her own interest in the dark and repressed parts of the psyche. She stated elsewhere that she had never read Jung before writing the first Earthsea books a few years earlier, and she has expressed her dislike of what she considers to be overly reductionist and mechanistic Jungian interpretations of her work. Her later young adult novel,The Beginning Place, has been said to engage more deliberately with Jungian archetypes. In 1976, literature scholar George Slusser criticized the "silly publication classification designating the original series as 'children's literature, while in Barbara Bucknall's opinion Le Guin "can be read, like Tolkien, by ten-year-olds and by adults. These stories are ageless because they deal with problems that confront us at any age." Several of her works have a premise drawn from sociology, psychology, or philosophy. As a result, Le Guin's writing is often described as "soft" science fiction, and she has been described as the "patron saint" of this sub-genre. A number of science fiction authors have objected to the term "soft science fiction", describing it as a potentially pejorative term used to dismiss stories not based on problems in physics, astronomy, or engineering, and also to target the writing of women or other groups under-represented in the genre. Le Guin suggested the term "social science fiction" for some of her writing, while pointing out that many of her stories were not science fiction at all. She argued that the term "soft science fiction" was divisive, and implied a narrow view of what constitutes valid science fiction. The influence of anthropology can be seen in the setting Le Guin chose for a number of her works. Several of her protagonists are anthropologists or ethnologists exploring a world alien to them. This is particularly true in the stories set in the Hainish universe, an alternative reality in which humans did not evolve on Earth, but on Hain. The Hainish subsequently colonized many planets, before losing contact with them, giving rise to varied but related biology and social structure. Examples include Rocannon in ''Rocannon's World and Genly Ai in The Left Hand of Darkness. Other characters, such as Shevek in The Dispossessed'', become cultural observers in the course of their journeys on other planets. Le Guin's writing often examines alien cultures, and particularly the human cultures from planets other than Earth in the Hainish universe. In discovering these "alien" worlds, Le Guin's protagonists, and by extension the readers, also journey into themselves, and challenge the nature of what they consider "alien" and what they consider "native". Several of Le Guin's works have featured stylistic or structural features that were unusual or subversive. The heterogeneous structure of The Left Hand of Darkness, described as "distinctly post-modern", was unusual for the time of its publication. This was in marked contrast to the structure of (primarily male-authored) traditional science fiction, which was straightforward and linear. The novel was framed as part of a report sent to the Ekumen by the protagonist Genly Ai after his time on the planet Gethen, thus suggesting that Ai was selecting and ordering the material, consisting of personal narration, diary extracts, Gethenian myths, and ethnological reports. Earthsea also employed an unconventional narrative form described by scholar Mike Cadden as "free indirect discourse", in which the feelings of the protagonist are not directly separated from the narration, making the narrator seem sympathetic to the characters, and removing the skepticism towards a character's thoughts and emotions that are a feature of more direct narration. Cadden suggests that this method leads to younger readers sympathizing directly with the characters, making it an effective technique for young-adult literature. A number of Le Guin's writings, including the Earthsea series, challenged the conventions of epic fantasies and myths. Many of the protagonists in Earthsea were dark-skinned individuals, in comparison to the white-skinned heroes more traditionally used; some of the antagonists, in contrast, were white-skinned, a switching of race roles that has been remarked upon by multiple critics. In a 2001 interview, Le Guin attributed the frequent lack of character illustrations on her book covers to her choice of non-white protagonists. She explained this choice, saying: "most people in the world aren't white. Why in the future would we assume they are?" Her 1985 book Always Coming Home, described as "her great experiment", included a story told from the perspective of a young protagonist, but also included poems, rough drawings of plants and animals, myths, and anthropological reports from the matriarchal society of the Kesh, a fictional people living in the Napa valley after a catastrophic global flood. == Themes ==

Gender and sexuality Gender and sexuality are prominent themes in a number of Le Guin's works. The Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969, was among the first books in the genre now known as feminist science fiction, and is the most famous examination of androgyny in science fiction. The story is set on the fictional planet of Gethen, whose inhabitants are ambisexual humans with no fixed gender identity, who adopt female or male sexual characteristics for brief periods of their sexual cycle. Which sex they adopt can depend on context and relationships. Gethen was portrayed as a society without war, as a result of this absence of fixed gender characteristics, and also without sexuality as a continuous factor in social relationships. Gethenian culture was explored in the novel through the eyes of a Terran, whose masculinity proves a barrier to cross-cultural communication. Outside the Hainish Cycle, Le Guin's use of a female protagonist in The Tombs of Atuan, published in 1971, was described as a "significant exploration of womanhood". (June 2008) Le Guin's attitude towards gender and feminism evolved considerably over time. Although The Left Hand of Darkness was seen as a landmark exploration of gender, it also received criticism for not going far enough. Reviewers pointed to its usage of masculine gender pronouns to describe its androgynous characters, the lack of androgynous characters portrayed in stereotypical feminine roles, and the portrayal of heterosexuality as the norm on Gethen. Le Guin's portrayal of gender in Earthsea was also described as perpetuating the notion of a male-dominated world; according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, "Le Guin saw men as the actors and doers in the [world], while women remain the still centre, the well from which they drink". Le Guin initially defended her writing; in a 1976 essay "Is Gender Necessary?" she wrote that gender was secondary to the primary theme of loyalty in The Left Hand of Darkness. Le Guin revisited this essay in 1988, and acknowledged that gender was central to the novel; she also apologized for depicting Gethenians solely in heterosexual relationships. Le Guin responded to these critiques in her subsequent writing. She intentionally used feminine pronouns for all sexually latent Gethenians in her 1995 short story "Coming of Age in Karhide", and in a later reprinting of "Winter's King", which was first published in 1969. "Coming of Age in Karhide" was later anthologized in the 2002 collection The Birthday of the World, which contained six other stories featuring unorthodox sexual relationships and marital arrangements. She also revisited gender relations in Earthsea in Tehanu, published in 1990. This volume was described as a rewriting or reimagining of The Tombs of Atuan, because the power and status of the female protagonist Tenar are the inverse of what they were in the earlier book, which was also focused on her and Ged. During this later period she commented that she considered The Eye of the Heron, published in 1978, to be her first work genuinely centered on a woman. Le Guin's 1986 essay "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" is a critique of the traditional idea of the hero in storytelling, "shifting the way we look at humanity's foundations from a narrative of domination to one of gathering, holding, and sharing," in the words of critic Siobhan Leddy. Moral development Le Guin explores coming of age, and moral development more broadly, in many of her writings. This is particularly the case in those works written for a younger audience, such as Earthsea and Annals of the Western Shore. Le Guin wrote in a 1973 essay that she chose to explore coming-of-age in Earthsea since she was writing for an adolescent audience: "Coming of age ... is a process that took me many years; I finished it, so far as I ever will, at about age thirty-one; and so I feel rather deeply about it. So do most adolescents. It's their main occupation, in fact." She also said that fantasy was best suited as a medium for describing coming of age, because exploring the subconscious was difficult using the language of "rational daily life". The first three Earthsea novels together follow Ged from youth to old age, and each of them also follow the coming of age of a different character. A Wizard of Earthsea focuses on Ged's adolescence, while The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore explore that of Tenar and the prince Arren, respectively. and features explorations of being enslaved to one's own power. The process of growing up is depicted as seeing beyond narrow choices the protagonists are presented with by society. In Gifts, Orrec and Gry realize that the powers their people possess can be used in two ways: for control and dominion, or for healing and nurturing. This recognition allows them to take a third choice, and leave. This wrestling with choice has been compared to the choices the characters are forced to make in Le Guin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas". Fellow author Kathleen Ann Goonan wrote that Le Guin's work confronted the "paradigm of insularity toward the suffering of people, other living beings, and resources", and explored "life-respecting sustainable alternatives". == Reception and legacy ==

Reception Le Guin received rapid recognition after the publication of The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969, and by the 1970s she was among the best known writers in the field. Her books sold many millions of copies, and were translated into more than 40 languages; several remain in print many decades after their first publication. Her work received intense academic attention; she has been described as being the "premier writer of both fantasy and science fiction" of the 1970s, the most frequently discussed science fiction writer of the 1970s, and over her career, as intensively studied as Philip K. Dick. Later in her career, she also received recognition from mainstream literary critics: in an obituary, Jo Walton stated that Le Guin "was so good that the mainstream couldn't dismiss SF any more". Not all of her works received as positive a reception; The Compass Rose was among the volumes that had a mixed reaction, while the Science Fiction Encyclopedia described The Eye of the Heron as "an over-diagrammatic political fable whose translucent simplicity approaches self-parody". Even the critically well-received The Left Hand of Darkness, in addition to critique from feminists, was described by Alexei Panshin as a "flat failure". Her writing was recognized by the popular media and by commentators. The Los Angeles Times commented in 2009 that after the death of Arthur C. Clarke, Le Guin was "arguably the most acclaimed science fiction writer on the planet", and went on to describe her as a "pioneer" of literature for young people. Praise for Le Guin frequently focused on the social and political themes her work explored, and for her prose; literary critic Harold Bloom described Le Guin as an "exquisite stylist", saying that in her writing, "Every word was exactly in place and every sentence or line had resonance". According to Bloom, Le Guin was a "visionary who set herself against all brutality, discrimination, and exploitation". Her prose, according to Zadie Smith, was "as elegant and beautiful as any written in the twentieth century". Academic and author Joyce Carol Oates highlighted Le Guin's "outspoken sense of justice, decency, and common sense", and called her "one of the great American writers and a visionary artist whose work will long endure". Locus Magazine subscribers have voted Le Guin to receive 25 Locus Awards. At the time of her death she was third for total wins, as well as second behind Neil Gaiman for awards for fiction. For her novels alone she won five Locus Awards, four Nebula Awards, two Hugo Awards, and one World Fantasy Award, and won each of those awards in short fiction categories as well. and she was a finalist for ten Mythopoeic Awards, nine in Fantasy and one for Scholarship. Other awards won by Le Guin include three James Tiptree Jr. Awards, and three Jupiter Awards. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted her in 2001, its sixth class of two deceased and two living writers. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named her its 20th Grand Master in 2003: she was the second, and at the time of death one of only six, women to receive that honor. In 2013, she was given the Eaton Award by the University of California, Riverside, for lifetime achievement in science fiction. Later in her career Le Guin also received accolades recognizing her contributions to literature more generally. In April 2000, the U.S. Library of Congress named Le Guin a Living Legend in the "Writers and Artists" category for her significant contributions to America's cultural heritage. The American Library Association granted her the annual Margaret Edwards Award in 2004, and also selected her to deliver the annual May Hill Arbuthnot Lecture. The Edwards Award recognizes one writer and a particular body of work: the 2004 panel cited the first four Earthsea volumes, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Beginning Place. The panel said that Le Guin "has inspired four generations of young adults to read beautifully constructed language, visit fantasy worlds that inform them about their own lives, and think about their ideas that are neither easy nor inconsequential". The American Academy of Arts and Letters made her a member in 2017. A crater on the planet Mercury was named in Le Guin's honor in November 2024. Legacy and influence Le Guin had a considerable influence on the field of speculative fiction; Jo Walton argued that Le Guin played a large role in both broadening the genre and helping genre writers achieve mainstream recognition. and modern writers have credited the book for the idea of a "wizard school", later made famous by the Harry Potter series of books, and with popularizing the trope of a boy wizard, also present in Harry Potter. The notion that names can exert power is a theme in the Earthsea series; critics have suggested that this inspired Hayao Miyazaki's use of the idea in his 2001 film Spirited Away. Le Guin's writings set in the Hainish universe also had a wide influence. Le Guin coined the name "ansible" for an instantaneous interstellar communication device in 1966; the term was later adopted by several other writers, including Orson Scott Card in the Ender Series and Neil Gaiman in a script for a Doctor Who episode. Suzanne Reid wrote that at the time The Left Hand of Darkness was written, Le Guin's ideas of androgyny were unique not only to science fiction, but to literature in general. That volume is specifically cited as leaving a large legacy; in discussing it, literary critic Harold Bloom wrote "Le Guin, more than Tolkien, has raised fantasy into high literature, for our time". Bloom followed this up by listing the book in his The Western Canon (1994) as one of the books in his conception of artistic works that have been important and influential in Western culture. This view was echoed in The Paris Review, which wrote that "No single work did more to upend the genre's conventions than The Left Hand of Darkness", Other writers she influenced include Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, as well as David Mitchell, Algis Budrys, Kathleen Goonan, and Iain Banks. Le Guin is also credited with inspiring several female science fiction authors in the 1970s, including Vonda McIntyre. When McIntyre established a writers' workshop in Seattle in 1971, Le Guin was one of the instructors. Film-maker Arwen Curry began production on a documentary about Le Guin in 2009, filming "dozens" of hours of interviews with the author as well as many other writers and artists who have been inspired by her. Curry launched a successful crowdfunding campaign to finish the documentary in early 2016 after winning a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction was announced in October 2021. The award is managed by the Ursula K. Le Guin Literary Trust and a panel of jurors. The prize is worth and is awarded annually to "a single book-length work of imaginative fiction." The inaugural winner was Khadija Abdalla Bajaber for her book The House of Rust. Adaptations of her work Le Guin's works have been adapted for radio, film, television, and the stage. Her 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven has been released on film twice, in 1979 by WNET with Le Guin's participation, and then in 2002 by the A&E Network. In a 2008 interview, she said she considered the 1979 version as "the only good adaptation to film" of her work to date. The third and fourth Earthsea books were used as the basis of Tales from Earthsea, released in 2006. Rather than being directed by Hayao Miyazaki himself, the film was directed by his son Gorō, which disappointed Le Guin. Le Guin was positive about the aesthetic of the film, writing that "much of it was beautiful", but was critical of the film's moral sense and its use of physical violence, and particularly the use of a villain whose death provided the film's resolution. Le Guin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness was adapted for the stage in 1995 by Chicago's Lifeline Theatre. Reviewer Jack Helbig at the Chicago Reader wrote that the "adaptation is intelligent and well crafted but ultimately unsatisfying", in large measure because it is extremely difficult to compress a complex 300-page novel into a two-hour stage presentation. Paradises Lost was adapted into an opera by the opera program of the University of Illinois. The opera was composed by Stephen A. Taylor; and to Marcia Johnson. Le Guin described the effort as a "beautiful opera" in an interview, and expressed hopes that it would be picked up by other producers. She also said she was better pleased with stage versions, including Paradises Lost, than screen adaptations of her work to that date. In 2025 Always Coming Home was adapted by F. Wiesel with Music by Jacob Bussmann at Theater & Orchester Heidelberg. == Written works ==

Le Guin's career as a professional writer spanned nearly sixty years, from 1959 to 2018. During this period, she wrote more than twenty novels, more than a hundred short stories, more than a dozen volumes of poetry, five translations, and thirteen children's books. Her writing encompassed speculative fiction, realistic fiction, non-fiction, screenplays, librettos, essays, poetry, speeches, translations, literary critiques, chapbooks, and children's fiction. Le Guin's first published work was the poem "Folksong from the Montayna Province" in 1959, while her first published short story was "An die Musik", in 1961. Her first professional publication was the short story "April in Paris" in 1962, while her first published novel was ''Rocannon's World, released by Ace Books in 1966. Her final publications included the non-fiction collections Dreams Must Explain Themselves and Ursula K Le Guin: Conversations on Writing, both released after her death. Her best-known works include the six volumes of the Earthsea'' series, and the many novels of the Hainish Cycle. == See also ==