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( The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including th...)
The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, and the Pushcart Prize, Ursula K. Le Guin is renowned for her spare, elegant prose, rich characterization, and diverse worlds. "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is a short story originally published in the collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters.
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( A revised and updated guide to the essentials of a writ...)
A revised and updated guide to the essentials of a writers craft, presented by a brilliant practitioner of the art Completely revised and rewritten to address the challenges and opportunities of the modern era, this handbook is a short, deceptively simple guide to the craft of writing. Le Guin lays out ten chapters that address the most fundamental components of narrative, from the sound of language to sentence construction to point of view. Each chapter combines illustrative examples from the global canon with Le Guins own witty commentary and an exercise that the writer can do solo or in a group. She also offers a comprehensive guide to working in writing groups, both actual and online. Masterly and concise, Steering the Craft deserves a place on every writer's shelf.
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(The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the ...)
The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, and the Pushcart Prize, Ursula K. Le Guin is renowned for her lyrical writing, rich characters, and diverse worlds. The Wind's Twelve Quarters collects seventeen powerful stories, each with an introduction by the author, ranging from fantasy to intriguing scientific concepts, from medieval settings to the future. Including an insightful foreword by Le Guin, describing her experience, her inspirations, and her approach to writing, this stunning collection explores human values, relationships, and survival, and showcases the myriad talents of one of the most provocative writers of our time.
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Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, on October 21, 1929. Her father, anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, was noted for his studies of the Native American cultures of California. Her mother, Theodora Kroeber Quinn, was a psychologist and, in her later years, a writer; she would be a particularly strong influence on her daughter, both as a writer and as a feminist.
Raised in an intellectually stimulating environment, Le Guin excelled at academics. After graduating from high school, she enrolled at Harvard University's Radcliffe College, where she received her bachelor's degree, in 1951, and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa national honorary. Course work in New York City, at Columbia University, followed. Le Guin was named a faculty fellow, in 1952, and received a Fulbright fellowship to study in Paris, in 1953, having earned her master's degree in romance literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance from Columbia, the previous year.
Le Guin's first written efforts consisted of poetry and short fiction. Her first published work was the story "April in Paris, " which appeared in Fantastic magazine, in 1962, when she was 33 years old. Le Guin's first novel, Rocannon's World, would be published by Ace Books, in 1966. It was the first of many science-fiction works she would write in the following decades, and the first of her five-volume "Hainish" series of novels.
While most science fiction has traditionally been dismissed by critics, as well as serious students of literature, Le Guin's sophisticated, well-studied, yet immensely readable novels have been able to break the barrier and gain a mainstream audience and mainstream attention, perhaps because of her ability to weave fantasy elements into her gentle, often dispassionate prose. After the publication of the highly acclaimed The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969, 1971's The Lathe of Heaven, and 1974's The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, Le Guin's work began to be taken seriously, even within academic circles.
In her works after the Hainish novels, Le Guin began to broaden her talents, writing poetry, the short play No Use to Talk to Me, two volumes of literary criticism, and several children's books. In her imaginative Catwings and Catwings Return, she entertained younger readers with imaginary worlds containing flying cats and kittens. In Le Guin's adult novels written after the mid-1970s, she also began to stretch the boundaries of her so-called science fiction, creating the quasi-history of an anonymous nineteenth-century country in 1979's, Malafrena, and again in the short stories collected in Orsinian Tales, and combining music (via an accompanying cassette), verse, anthropologist's notations, and stories in 1985's, Always Coming Home, a book about the Kesh, future inhabitants of California who establish a new society after ecological Armageddon.
Whether set in the past or future, each of Le Guin's novels actually addressed the present. Imbedded within the plot of her 1972 novel The Word for World Is Forest, thoughtful readers could easily discover solemn parallels to the Vietnam War era, as well as telling commentary about the destruction of the world's rain forests.
Spanning Le Guin's career as a writer were her four award-winning Earthsea novels, which have been praised by critics as some of her most enjoyable works. Beginning with 1968's A Wizard of Earthsea, readers met the goat herder Ged, who lives on one of a kingdom of islands known as Earthsea, as he trains to become a practitioner of magic. In later novels in the series-The Tombs of Atuan (1970) and The Farthest Shore (1972)-Ged matured as both a man and a wizard, grappling with hubris, then flattery, before sacrificing his own powers to save his world. In 1990s, Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea, which concluded the series and which Le Guin wrote as a response to criticism by feminists that her male protagonists were all powerful, and female characters merely helpers, an elderly woman and a young girl were featured. According to Charlotte Spivack in her appraisal, Ursula Le Guin, "Earthsea is a convincingly authenticated world, drawn with a sure hand for fine detail. [It is a] mature narrative of growing up, a moral tale without a moral, a realistic depiction of a fantasy world. "
In addition to her prolific career as an author, Le Guin has taught writing workshops at numerous colleges around the United States, as well as in Australia and Great Britain. She has also revised several of her early works, updating them in response to her growing feminist leanings. She has also been involved in the adaptation of several of her novels into motion pictures. The Public Television production of The Lathe of Heaven, in 1980, benefited from her adaptation of her own novel-the story about a man whose dreams alter reality-as well as her on-the-set production assistance. Le Guin's positive appraisal of the resulting film was a marked contrast to most authors' feelings about their work after a film crew gets through with it. The recipient of numerous awards, she continued to make her home in Oregon.
In December 2009, Le Guin resigned from the Authors Guild in protest over its endorsement of Google's book digitization project. "You decided to deal with the devil", she wrote in her resignation letter. "There are principles involved, above all the whole concept of copyright; and these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle. "
In April 2000 the U. S. Library of Congress made Le Guin a Living Legend in the "Writers and Artists" category for her significant contributions to America's cultural heritage. In 2002 she won a PEN/Malamud Award for "excellence in a body of short fiction". In 2004 she received two American Library Association honors for her lasting contributions: for young adult literature, the annual Margaret Edwards Award; for children's literature, selection to deliver the annual May Hill Arbuthnot Lecture. The annual Edwards Award recognizes one writer and a particular body of work; the 2004 panel cited six works published from 1968 to 1990: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, and Tehanu (the first four Earthsea books), 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. "
In 2014, Le Guin was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation, a lifetime achievement award. Her acceptance speech, which criticized Amazon as a "profiteer" and praised her fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, was widely considered the highlight of the ceremony.
Recognizing her stature in the speculative fiction genre, Le Guin was the Professional Guest of Honor at the 1975 World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne, Australia. That year she was also named the sixth Gandalf Award Grand Master of fantasy. The Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA) gave her its Pilgrim Award in 1989 for her "lifetime contributions to SF and fantasy scholarship". At the 1995 World Fantasy Convention she won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, a judged recognition of outstanding service to the fantasy field. 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 made her its 20th Grand Master in 2003. In 2010, Le Guin was awarded the Lyman Tower Sargent Distinguished Scholar Award by the North American Society for Utopian Studies.
Her speech "A Left-Handed Commencement Address", given in 1983 at Mills College, is listed as No. 82 in American Rhetoric's Top 100 Speeches of the 20th Century (listed by rank).
( A revised and updated guide to the essentials of a writ...)
( The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including th...)
(The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the ...)
(Join Ursula K. Le Guin as she explores a broad array of s...)
(Mrs. Jane Tabby cannot explain why all four of her kitten...)
Quotations:
"Time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises. "
"Reading is performance. The reader--the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk--performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater. "
"The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women. "
"The creative adult is the child who has survived. "
"Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls. "
"All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them. "
"To hear, one must be silent. "
Quotes from others about the person
"Like one or two other SF figures of unassailable stature, Le Guin is deeply courteous. She seems to meet people in the expectation, or maybe simply the hope that she will learn from the encounter. She is like the novelist Doris Lessing; they do not reflect the world; they absorb it. "
John Clute, Science Fiction : A Visual Encyclopedia. Dorling Kindersley, 1995 (p. 178)
"For Margaret Atwood, Le Guin is a "quintessentially American writer", of undoubted literary quality, "for whom the quest for the Peaceable Kingdom is ongoing". Her worlds, Le Guin says, are not so much invented as discovered. "I stare and see something, maybe a person in a landscape, and have to find out what it is. " But whether charting inner lands or outer space, her eye remains on the here and now. At 76, Le Guin counts among her affiliations the peace and women's movements ("I take a perverse pleasure in calling myself a feminist"), and Taoism ("profoundly subversive"). "
Maya Jaggi, in "The magician", in The Guardian (17 December 2005)
In 1953, while traveling to France, Le Guin met her future husband, historian Charles Le Guin. They married later that year in Paris. Their first child, Elisabeth, was born in Moscow, Idaho, where Charles taught. In 1959 the Le Guins moved to Portland, Oregon, where their daughter Caroline was born, and where they still reside.
He was an American cultural anthropologist.
She was a writer and anthropologist, best known for her accounts of Ishi, the last member of the Yahi tribe of California, and for her retelling of traditional narratives from several Native Californian cultures.
She was born in 1959.
She was born in 1957.
