Ursula Le Guin is one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. She wrote twenty-three novels, twelve volumes of short stories, five collections of essays, eleven volumes of poetry, thirteen children’s books and four works of translation. She won numerous awards and honours, including multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, the National Book Award, and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
Her books are usually found on science fiction shelves. She may not have been too thrilled with this, given her resistance to genre labels applied to her work, which can sometimes be reductive. She may have written about imaginary worlds, but that is not all she wrote. And for many readers, the worlds she imagined and the people in them provided more insight into the human condition than novels that have realism at their core.
Le Guin’s approach to her writing was sociological and anthropological. She was curious about how societies functioned and explored human complexity and psychology in her novels. Throughout her writing life, she chafed at being labelled a science fiction writer. She felt that it kept readers who thought they “didn’t read sci-fi” away, and that it implied that her work was somehow not literary, which could not be further from the truth, given her characters and the quality of her prose.
Here’s a look at a few of her books:
The Earthsea Series is generally acknowledged as one of the great works of 20th century fantasy. This collection of novels and short stories is set in a fictional world of magic and wizardry and is a nuanced exploration of the power of language and the nature of magic.
The first novel in the series, published in 1968, features a young wizard named Ged (or Sparrowhawk), who is training as a wizard on the island of Roke. While at the school, Ged, in an unintentional, but reckless act brought on by pride, releases a terrible, dark force into the world, a force that is now connected to him. He realizes that he will never be free unless he faces this force that threatens the world of Earthsea and sets out on a quest.
Le Guin subverted the sci-fi/fantasy norms of her time by making her protagonist a boy of colour. This is never dwelt on; it is simply a fact you notice some way through the book. The subsequent novels in the series, Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, Tehanu, Tales from Earthsea,The Other Wind follow different characters but all take place in the same fictional world of Earthsea. Le Guin wrote the first three books in reasonably quick succession between 1968 and 1972.
But when she came back to this world in 1990, she wondered why she, as a woman, was writing largely about what men do. She changed her lens in the later stories to include more female protagonists, to write about men and women.
In The Left Hand of Darkness, she went beyond gender and wrote about a planet where the human inhabitants have no fixed gender but have the potential to become either, only once each month, reverting to a neutral state thereafter. "The king was pregnant," the book tells us early on.
The visitor/protagonist from Earth has much to learn about this world, and so do we as readers, with our own fixed views upended. As a bonus we get to do this through a thrilling adventure with beautiful prose. Several writers including Zadie Smith and Neil Gaiman have cited The Left Hand of Darkness as a significant influence.
The Dispossessed is a that novel explores themes of capitalism, anarchism, revolution, and the struggle for social justice and is considered a seminal work of anarchist literature. It tells the story of two planets, Urras and Anarres, twin worlds in the same solar system. Urras is a rich and capitalist planet, while Anarres is poor and anarchist.
Shevek, a physicist from Anarres, is working on a theory that could revolutionize interstellar communication. Frustrated by the isolationist policies and bureaucracy on Anarres, he decides to travel to Urras hoping to find collaborators who will help him develop his theory.
To visit Urras, to learn, to teach and to share, involves sacrifice and risk, which Shevek willingly accepts. But his gift is soon seen as a threat, and in the profound conflict that ensues, he must re-examine his beliefs even as he inspires change.
The Word for World Is Forest was in some ways Le Guin's response and resistance to the Vietnam war that she staunchly opposed. This book won the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 1973.
It’s a story about two worlds and two peoples, the Athsheans, inhabitants of a peaceful world, who are enslaved by the bloodthirsty Yumens. Forced into servitude, they find themselves at the mercy of their brutal masters. Desperation causes them to retaliate against their captors, abandoning their own strictures against violence, thus endangering the foundations of their society.
Over the course of her extraordinary career, Le Guin wrote several essays on themes that mattered most to her - anthropology, environmentalism, feminism, social justice and literary criticism. She even reassessed her own work over time, responding thoughtfully to criticism.
Dreams Must Explain Themselves (selected non-fiction) and Words Are My Matter (a collection of her talks, essays, introductions to beloved books, and book reviews), are essential reading.
Ursula Le Guin passed away in 2018 at the age of 89. Her first and only authorized biography, written by Julie Philips, is scheduled to come out in 2026.