24th January 2018
Ursula K Le Guin: US fantasy author dies at home in Oregon (bbc.co.uk).
The best-selling writer passed away on Monday at her home in Portland, Oregon, after a period of ill health. Le Guin’s books melded dragons and wizards with spaceships to tackle earth-bound problems of race, gender and class. She wrote more than 20 novels and over 100 short stories that sold millions of copies around the world.
And designated a Library of Congress Living Legend in 2000 and made a Grandmaster of Science Fiction, one of a few women writers to take the top honor in the genre” in 2003.
She was best known for the Earthsea series, written for young adults, and her 1969 sci-fi classic The Left Hand of Darkness, set on a planet called Gethen, where everyone is ambisexual. “I tend to avoid fiction about dysfunctional urban middle-class people written in the present tense,” she once said.
But with fantasy, sci-fi and erotica often sharing an audience and therefore often the same publishing beat for writers and artists, even for an avowed feminist:
A lifelong student of taoism (ekostories.com, Apr. 2013) and a self-described “bourgeois housewife” embraced by anarchists (lithub.com, Apr. 2016), she will be greatly missed.
#RIPUrsulaKLeGuin (Twitter).
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