Anthropologists’ daughter who remapped speculative fiction
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) built the Hainish science-fiction universe and Earthsea fantasy after publishing from 1959. Born in Berkeley to anthropologists Theodora and Alfred Kroeber, she left French doctoral work after marrying historian Charles Le Guin in 1953. Eight Hugos, six Nebulas, twenty-five Locus Awards followed.
Taoism, feminism, Jung, and cultural anthropology shaped observer protagonists and balance themes that subverted genre defaults. In 2003 she became the second woman named Grand Master of science fiction.
Her father taught anthropology at Berkeley, and her mother, trained in psychology, turned to writing in her sixties. She grew up with three older brothers, a large family library and visitors such as Robert Oppenheimer, reading Astounding Science Fiction, Norse myths and the Native American legends her father told. She earned a Radcliffe degree in Renaissance French and Italian literature between 1947 and 1951, then met Charles Le Guin aboard the Queen Mary in 1953; they married in Paris that December, which she said ended her doctorate.
Her first publication was a 1959 poem set in the invented country of Orsinia, and her first story, An die Musik, followed in 1961; five Orsinian novels written between 1951 and 1961 were all rejected. Ace Books issued her first novel, Rocannon's World, in 1966, followed by Planet of Exile and City of Illusions, together called the Hainish trilogy. When Playboy ran her story Nine Lives in 1968, it printed the byline U. K. Le Guin at the magazine's request, the only time she said she met prejudice as a woman writer.
She took public stands. In 1977 she declined a Nebula for The Diary of the Rose to protest the Science Fiction Writers of America revoking Stanisław Lem's membership, and in December 2009 she quit the Authors Guild over its endorsement of Google's book-scanning deal, accusing it of dealing with the devil. Raised, as she put it, irreligious, she drew on Taoism and Buddhism and published her version of the Tao Te Ching in 1997. She died at home in Portland on January 22, 2018, aged 88.
Source: Ursula K. Le Guin
