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 Novelist,
Poet, & Essayist
Benaroya Hall, Monday, April 8, 2002
Kane Hall, October 22, 1998
Biography
Excerpt
Selected Works
Links
Biography
Ursula K. Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, in 1929, the daughter
of
anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and Theodora Kroeber, a psychologist and
writer. She studied at Radcliffe College and Columbia University, where
she earned her Masters degree. In the early 1950s, Le Guin went to Paris
on a Fulbright Fellowship, where she met and married historian Charles
Le Guin. They eventually settled in Portland, Oregon, where they still
live and remain strong supporters of the local literary community.
For the past forty years, Le Guin has held a steady and influential presence
in the literary world. Author of forty books, Le Guin is revered by readers
and critics in almost every genre, including science fiction, fantasy,
poetry, children’s books, and literary criticism. Her first novel,
Rocannon’s World, was published in 1966. Three years and three
novels later, she published one of her best-known books, The Left Hand
of Darkness (1969), a ground-breaking science fiction novel that challenged
gender roles and earned numerous literary awards. Newsweek called
Le Guin’s writing “splendidly intricate and hugely imaginative,”
declaring, “she wields her pen with a moral and psychological sophistication
rarely seen.” Le Guin’s extensive body of work includes The
Lathe of Heaven (1971), The Dispossessed (1974), Always
Coming Home (1985), Worlds of Exile and Illusion (1996), and
Sixty Odd: New Poems (1999). Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle,
which consists of four linked novels, has been translated into sixteen
languages and has become one of the most beloved fantasies of our time.
A definitive influence on Le Guin and her writing has been the feminist
movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Before Le Guin, the feminist
influence was virtually nonexistent in science fiction writing. Le Guin
was at the head of a generation of writers who successfully incorporated
human feeling into the previously hard-edged field of science fiction.
“In her work, she reminds us again and again that stories are the
primary medium for the transfer and sustaining of our personal and cultural
being,” wrote The Los Angeles Times.
Next to feminism, the other major influence on Le Guin’s work is
Taoism. She has translated Taoist texts and often incorporates themes
of Taoist thought into her work. “If I have any particular job as
a writer,” wrote Le Guin, “it’s to open as many doors and
windows as possible and to leave them open.”
A winner
of numerous literary accolades, Le Guin’s honors include five Hugo
Awards and five Nebula Awards for science fiction. Her list of awards
also includes the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize, a National Book Award,
and the Howard Vursell Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters. She
has been a finalist for several American Book Awards and was shortlisted
for the Pulitzer Prize.
Excerpt
taken from The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (2002)
I live in the oldest city in the world. Long before there were kings in
Karhide, Rer was a city, the marketplace and meeting ground for all the
Northeast, the Plains, and Kerm Land. The Fastness of Rer was a center
of learning, a refuge, a judgment seat fifteen thousand years ago. Karhide
became a nation here, under the Geger kings, who ruled for a thousand
years. In the thousandth year Sedern Geger, the Unking, cast the crown
into the River Arre from the palace towers, proclaiming an end to dominion.
The time they call the Flowering of Rer, the Summer Century, began then.
It ended when the Hearth of Harge took power and moved their capital across
the mountains to Erhenrang. The Old Palace has been empty for centuries.
But it stands. Nothing in Rer falls down. The Arre floods through the
street-tunnels every year in the Thaw, winter blizzards may bring thirty
feet of snow, but the city stands. Nobody knows how old the houses are,
because they have been rebuilt forever. Each one sits in its gardens without
respect to the position of any of the others, as vast and random and ancient
as hills. The roofed streets and canals angle about among them. Rer is
all corners. We say that the Harges left because they were afraid of what
might be around the corner.
Time is different
here. I learned in school how the Orgota, the Ekumen, and most other people
count years. They call the year of some portentous event Year One and
number forward from it. Here it’s always Year One. On Getheny Thern,
New Year’s Day, the Year One becomes one-ago, one-to-come becomes
One, and so on. It’s like Rer, everything always changing but the
city never changing.
*
* *
The year I was born (the Year One, or sixty-four-ago) was the year Argaven’s
second reign began. By the time I was noticing anything beyond my own
toes, the war was over, the West Fall was part of Karhide again, the capital
was back in Erhenrang, and most of the damage done to Rer during the Overthrow
of Emran had been repaired. The old houses had been rebuilt again. The
Old Palace had been patched again. Argaven XVII was miraculously back
on the throne again. Everything was the way it used to be, ought to be,
back to normal, just like the old days—everybody said so.
Indeed those were
quiet years, an interval of recovery before Argaven, the first Gethenian
who ever left our planet, brought us at last fully into the Ekumen; before
we, not they, became the Aliens; before we came of age. When I was a child
we lived the way people had lived in Rer forever. It is that way, that
timeless world, that world around the corner, I have been thinking about,
and trying to describe for people who never knew it. Yet as I write I
see how also nothing changes, that it is truly the Year One always, for
each child that comes of age, each lover who falls in love.
Selected
Works
World's of Exile and Illusion: (1966)
Rocannon’s World (1967)
Planet of Exile (1966)
City of Illusions (1967)
The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Earthsea Tetrology: A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
The Tombs of Atuan (1971)
The Farthest Shore (1972)
Tehanu (1990)
The Lathe of Heaven (1971)
The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1974)
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)
The Beginning Place (1980)
Always Coming Home (1985)
Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight? (1987)
Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (1989)
A Ride on the Red Mare’s Back (1992)
A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (1994)
Steering the Craft (1998)
Sixty Odd: New Poems (1999)
The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (2002)
Web
Site Links
The Unofficial Ursula K. Le Guin Site
Salon.com
– Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin's official
web site
Underwritten
by Hedgebrook: A Retreat for Women Writers
Photo: Marion Wood Kolisch
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