Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018) was an American author of speculative fiction. She is best known for her works set in her Hainish universe, and the Earthsea fantasy series. Cultural anthropology, Taoism, feminism, and Carl Jung all had a strong influence on her work. She died at the age of 83 in January 2018.
About Ursula K. Le Guin in brief
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018) was an American author of speculative fiction. She is best known for her works set in her Hainish universe, and the Earthsea fantasy series. She was first published in 1959, and her literary career spanned nearly sixty years. Cultural anthropology, Taoism, feminism, and Carl Jung all had a strong influence on her work. She received numerous accolades, including eight Hugos, six Nebulas, and twenty-two Locus Awards. In 2003, she was the second woman honored as a Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. The U.S. Library of Congress named her a Living Legend in 2000, and in 2014, she won the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She influenced many other authors, including Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Neil Gaiman, and Iain Banks. She died at the age of 83 in January 2018, and is survived by her husband, Charles, and their three children, Theodore, Clifton, and Karl. Her novels include A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness, which have been described by Harold Bloom as her masterpieces. She also wrote more than a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children’s books. She often subverted typical speculative fiction tropes, such as through her use of dark-skinned protagonists in Earthsea, and also used unusual stylistic or structural devices in books such as Always Coming Home. Social and political themes, including race, gender, sexuality, and coming of age were prominent in her writing.
Many of her stories used anthropologists or cultural observers as protagonists, and Taoist ideas about balance and equilibrium have been identified in several writings. She would later use Robert Oppenheimer as the model for the physicist protagonist of The Dispossessed. She wrote a short story when she was nine, and submitted her first short story to Astounding Science Fiction. Other authors she enjoyed were Lord Dunany and Lord Dunsany Padgett, and she would narrate her father’s Norse myths and Native American legends that her father would Narrate to her. She had a love of science fiction, particularly Norse mythology and Norse legends, particularly the myths of Norse mythology, that she would read with her siblings. She said she would prefer to be known as an \”American novelist\”. She was married to historian Charles Le Guin for more than 50 years, and had three older brothers: Karl, who became a literary scholar,. Theodore, and Cliften. She won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, becoming the first woman to do so. Her father was an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Her mother had a graduate degree in psychology, but turned to writing in her sixties, developing a successful career as an author. Among her works was Ishi in Two Worlds, a biographical volume about Ishi, an indigenous American who became the last known member of the Yahi tribe after the rest of its members were killed by white colonizers.
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