Author Le Guin dies at 88
Ursula K. Le Guin, the award-winning United States science fiction and fantasy author, and avowed feminist whose books have sold millions worldwide, has died, her family announced on Tuesday. She was 88.
Le Guin is best remembered for global bestselling Earthsea series, translated into many languages and adapted for the screen, in which an apprentice sorcerer fights against the powers of evil, decades before Harry Potter did the same.
In a career that spanned decades, she published more than 20 novels, wrote children’s books, dozens of short stories, volumes of poetry and collections of essays.
Tributes quickly poured in, with American horror writer Stephen King mourning her as “one of the greats”, after Le Guin’s family announced her death. “Not just a science fiction writer; a literary icon. Godspeed into the galaxy,” tweeted King. She was born in October 1929 in Berkeley, California, the daughter of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, an expert on Native Americans, and Theodora Kroeber, who wrote Ishi in Two Worlds, an acclaimed biography of about “the last wild Indian” in North America.
Educated at Radcliffe College, Massachusetts, and New York’s Columbia University, Le Guin was a Fulbright Fellow in 1953, travelling to Paris, where she married her husband, the historian Charles Le Guin before the couple returned to the US.
They settled in Portland, Oregon where they raised three children and Le Guin embarked on her prolific literary career.