Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born in Berkeley in 1929 to the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber, and grew up in a house where cultural difference was the family subject. That upbringing runs through everything she wrote.

She took degrees at Radcliffe and Columbia in Renaissance French and Italian literature, married the historian Charles Le Guin in 1953, and settled in Portland, Oregon, where she lived for the rest of her life.

Her major work reshaped two genres. The Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969, imagines a world whose inhabitants have no fixed sex, and won the Hugo and the Nebula. The Dispossessed, in 1974, sets an anarchist society against a capitalist one and refuses to make either simple, and won both awards again. The Earthsea books, beginning with A Wizard of Earthsea in 1968, were written for young readers and are among the few fantasy works that treat magic as a discipline with a cost.

She was a formidable critic and polemicist. Her essay Epic Pooh and her attacks on the commercial pressures of publishing were unsparing, and her 2014 National Book Awards speech, in which she said that resistance and change often begin in art and that publishers who treat books as commodities should not be obeyed, is one of the more quoted statements about the industry.

Steering the Craft, first published in 1998 and substantially revised in 2015, came out of a workshop she ran on the Oregon coast. It is a short book about the sentence, covering sound, punctuation, syntax, tense, point of view, and what she calls crowding and leaping, with an exercise after each chapter. It leaves out plot, structure, and character entirely, and says so.

She died in Portland in 2018 at eighty-eight.