Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929- ), American fantasy and science-fiction writer. Among Ursula K. Le Guin’s best-known and most admired works are The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.

She was born Ursula Kroeber on October 21, 1929, in Berkeley, California. Her mother was a writer of children's books and her father an anthropologist, with the result that she grew up immersed in legends and myths. Having attended Radcliffe College, she earned a master's degree at Columbia University (1952), then won a Fulbright fellowship to study in France. There she met and married Charles Le Guin, returning afterwards with him to Macon, Georgia, where she taught French at Mercer University. In 1966, after Ursula K. Le Guin had written five unpublished novels, Rocannon's World appeared; it was the first of the Hainish cycle based on the Norse Odin myths. Subsequent books include Planet of Exile (1966); City of Illusions (1967); The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), winner of the Nebula Award of the Science Fiction Writers of America and the Hugo Award of the World Science Fiction Convention; The Word for World Is Forest (1972), winner of the Hugo Award; and The Dispossessed (1974), which also won the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award.

Ursula K. Le Guin also won the National Book Award for Children's Literature for The Farthest Shore (1972), the third book of her Earthsea series. Her later works include the science-fiction novel The Eye of the Heron (1978); Always Coming Home (1985), a work of anthropological fiction; Fish Soup (1992), for children; Gifts (2004), the first of a new series, Annals of the Western Shore, for teenagers; and Lavinia (2008), a retelling of the Aeneid by Virgil.