Ursula K. Le Guin

@ursulakleguin.bsky.social

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Official account for the celebrated author of novels, short stories, poetry, children’s books and essays.

https://www.ursulakleguin.com/

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We're delighted to announce — with help from Electric Literature — the shortlist for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. Congratulations to the authors! The recipient of this year's prize will be announced on Ursula's birthday, October 21st. electricliterature.com/announcing-t...

The Left Hand of Darkness comes in at #6 in Esquire's updated list of the 75 best science fiction books of all time

The 75 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Timewww.esquire.com See if your favorites made our expanded list.

Little bear, big lion. Europe, early 1950s.

Happy 57th anniversary of signing the first contract for A Wizard of Earthsea, which you will note was titled, at the time of signing, The Wizard's Quest. Narrow escape!

At Dirt, Meghna Rao considers Ursula's original website: "Her old domain locates an important moment, in which a personal website could be more than just a banner ad for work or a case of trophies—when it represented an attempt to translate something about the self into virtual space."

Space Cronedirt.fyi The website as imagination.

The reissued The Language of the Night, with a new intro from Ken Liu, is now available from Scribner. www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-La...

🌟 In really lovely news, Space Crone won the 2024 Locus Award for Best Non-Fiction! 🌟 Congratulations to Silver Press and editors So Mayer and Sarah Shin. www.silverpress.org/products/spa...

Space Crone by Ursula K. Le Guinwww.silverpress.org Edited and introduced by So Mayer and Sarah Shin Ursula K. Le Guin witnessed and contributed to many of the twentieth century’s rebellions and upheavals, including women’s liberation, the Civil Rights...

A new audiobook edition of The Left Hand of Darkness is now available from Recorded Books! The novel is narrated by Michael Crouch, with Ursula's author's note narrated by Alyssa Bresnahan. www.audiobooks.com/promotions/p...

This hungry French Bookworm (a distant cousin, perhaps, of the Welsh we shared in April) was drawn by Ursula in a Multnomah County Library newsletter, circa 1981. The newsletter is in the archive of Ursula’s papers at the University of Oregon library. Thanks to @rblemberg.bsky.social for the pic!

We're delighted to announce a new future for Ursula's home in Portland, Oregon. The Le Guin family will donate the house to Literary Arts as a site for the Ursula K. Le Guin Writers Residency. apnews.com/article/ursu...

Ursula K. Le Guin's home will become a writers residencyapnews.com The former home of the late Ursula K. Le Guin is being readied to become a base for contemporary authors.

"To say that the Le Guin we meet in this book is argumentative, sometimes unfair, sometimes wrong and even self-contradictory is not to diminish her greatness. It is rather to rescue her from the dullness imposed on her by her canonization." —B.D. McClay in the Washington Post

Review | Ursula K. Le Guin was her own toughest (and best) criticwww.washingtonpost.com In “The Language of the Night,” a recently reissued classic, she engages science fiction and fantasy — including her novels — with passionate intensity.

At last month's Seattle Art Book Fair, Winter Texts made a display weave of their latest editions of Ursula's works. Get your own copies here: www.wintertexts.com

Oops. (This note—surely somewhat relatable for many a writer—comes from Ursula's files at Radcliffe.)

2024 marks the 50th anniversary of The Dispossessed, which was first published in May of 1974. This November, an anniversary edition arrives on shelves, courtesy of Harper Perennial! Karen Joy Fowler provided the new foreword, and the cover art is by Muhammad Fatchurofi.

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Ursula K. Le Guin

Apparently Schrödinger’s Cat wasn't something people knew about until Ursula wrote about it. She knew, because she read about relativity and quantum mechanics while she was writing her physicist character in The Dispossessed. physicsworld.com/a/ursula-le-...

Ursula Le Guin: the pioneering author we should thank for popularizing Schrödinger’s cat – Physics Worldphysicsworld.com Robert P Crease on why we can thank Ursula Le Guin for popularizing Schrödinger’s cat

At LitHub, an excerpt from The Language of the Night — specifically, from "Talking About Writing"

Ursula K. Le Guin on How to Become a Writerlithub.com This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. How do you become a writer? Answer: you write. It’s amazing how much resentment and disgust and evasion this answer can ar…

Wonderful Alexander and the Catwings was first published in 1994—which means the third Catwings tale is now 30 years old.

Pard is perforce an indoor cat and thus has great curiosity about Nature. Recently he escaped for a short (discreetly monitored) walkabout.

"The Space Crone" was originally published in 1976 in what was then called The CoEvolution Quarterly (and later called the Whole Earth Review). Currently, you can find it in Dancing at the Edge of the World (Grove, 1989), and also in Space Crone, published by Silver Press last year.

The Language of the Night is back on shelves! Ursula’s first collection of nonfiction was published in 1979, then released in a revised edition in 1992. This edition, with the revised text, has a new introduction from Ken Liu and is published by Scribner. www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-La...

In 1969, Publishers Weekly reviewed The Left Hand of Darkness. They may have missed the point. (Thank you to @juliephillips.bsky.social for first posting this!)

The Folio Society edition of The Other Wind arrives today, as part of the publisher's summer collection! Like the first five books of Earthsea, the Folio edition is illustrated by David Lupton. www.foliosociety.com/usa/the-othe...

The Other Windwww.foliosociety.com Ursula K. Le Guin’s masterwork comes to a close with the final volume of the Earthsea series. The Folio Society edition of The Other Wind is illustrated by series artist David Lupton.

For comic relief, some spammy interweb weirdness this week: a hallucinated new character in Earthsea, and a WhatsApp call from another dimension (which reminds us, Inverse recently had a neat article about J. Michael Straczynski's dedication to bringing Harlan Ellison's work to the fore again).

This is it! Nominations for this year's prize close at midnight (PDT) tonight. If you've read and loved a book that fit the criteria, we hope you'll nominate it!

Nominations are now open for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction! Anyone can nominate work for this $25,000 prize - and just one reader's nomination can make all the difference. All the details, and the nomination form, are here: www.ursulakleguin.com/prize24

Incredible Good Fortune was published in 2006 by Shambhala

"Politically she was an anarchist, religiously a Taoist, socially a feminist beyond feminism, and one of the most eloquent prophets against our despoliation of air, water, earth and its creatures, foliage, woodlands. Reading her I almost learn how it is to be a tree." —from Harold Bloom's intro

One week left! You have through April 30th to nominate books for this year’s Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction—nominations are open to all, and a single nomination can make all the difference. Which book will be the next winner of this $25,000 prize? www.ursulakleguin.com/prize24

From 1978. #earthday

“The poet’s measures serve anarchic joy. The story-teller tells one story: freedom.” —from “Read at the Award Dinner, May 1996” Sixty Odd was published by Shambhala in 1999.

Found in the attic. Cursory search of the archives of Willamette Week doesn’t turn up anything, but one remains intrigued.