Ursula K. Le Guin
| Date of Birth | : | 21 Oct, 1929 |
| Date of Death | : | 22 Jan, 2018 |
| Place of Birth | : | Berkeley, California, United States |
| Profession | : | Author, Poet, Novelist |
| Nationality | : | American |
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe, and the Earthsea fantasy series.
Biography
Le Guin, the daughter of distinguished anthropologist A.L. Kroeber and writer Theodora Kroeber, attended Radcliffe College (B.A., 1951) and Columbia University (M.A., 1952). The methods of anthropology influenced her science-fiction stories, which often feature highly detailed descriptions of alien societies. Her first three novels, Rocannon’s World (1966), Planet of Exile (1966), and City of Illusions (1967), introduce beings from the planet Hain, who established human life on habitable planets, including Earth. Although her Earthsea series—A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Tombs of Atuan (1971), The Farthest Shore (1972), Tehanu (1990), Tales from Earthsea (2001), and The Other Wind (2001)—was written for children, Le Guin’s skillful writing and acute perceptions attracted a large adult readership. She tapped the young adult market again with her Annals of the Western Shore series, which includes Gifts (2004), Voices (2006), and Powers (2007). Le Guin also wrote a series of books about cats with wings; the series included Catwings Return and Jane on Her Own, both published in 1999.
Le Guin’s most philosophically significant novels exhibit the same attention to detail that characterizes her science fiction and high fantasy works. The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) is about a race of androgynous people who may become either male or female. In The Dispossessed (1974), she examined two neighbouring worlds that are home to antithetical societies, one capitalist, the other anarchic, both of which stifle freedom in particular ways. The destruction of indigenous peoples on a planet colonized by Earth is the focus of The Word for World Is Forest (1972). Always Coming Home (1985) concerns the Kesh, survivors of nuclear war in California, and includes poetry, prose, legends, autobiography, and a tape recording of Kesh music. In 2008 Le Guin made literary news with Lavinia, a metatextual examination of a minor character from Virgil’s Aeneid and her role in the historical development of early Rome.
Le Guin also wrote many essays on fantasy fiction, feminist issues, writing, and other topics, some of them collected in The Language of the Night (1979), Dancing at the Edge of the World (1989), Steering the Craft (1998), The Wave in the Mind (2004), and Words Are My Matter (2016). No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters (2017) is a selection of personal essays that originally appeared on her blog. Le Guin’s volumes of poetry included Wild Angels (1975), Wild Oats and Fireweed (1988), Going Out with Peacocks, and Other Poems (1994), Incredible Good Fortune (2006), and Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems 1960–2010 (2012).
In 2000 she was awarded the Living Legend medal by the Library of Congress.
Quotes
No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
Change is freedom, change is life. It's always easier not to think for oneself. Find a nice safe hierarchy and settle in. Don't make changes, don't risk disapproval, don't upset your syndics. It's always easiest to let yourself be governed. There's a point, around age twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities. Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfil my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to go unbuild walls.
The creative adult is the child who has survived.
People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
Injustice makes the rules, and courage breaks them.
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.
