Ursula K. Le Guin

4 universes Last reviewed 2026-09-28

Ursula K. Le Guin was born October 21, 1929, in Berkeley, California, and died January 22, 2018, in Portland, Oregon, at age eighty-eight. She earned a BA in Renaissance French and Italian literature from Radcliffe College and an MA in French from Columbia University, and pursued doctoral studies on a Fulbright grant before abandoning them after marrying historian Charles Le Guin in Paris. She taught French at several colleges and later taught writing at Tulane, Bennington, and Stanford, alongside work as an editor and literary critic, across a writing career spanning nearly sixty years that produced more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, plus poetry, essays, and translations. Her best-known works include the Earthsea series (1964-2018), beginning with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), and the science fiction novels The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Dispossessed (1974), and Always Coming Home (1985). She won eight Hugo Awards, six Nebula Awards, and twenty-five Locus Awards, plus the 1973 National Book Award for Young People's Literature, the 2003 SFWA Grand Master Award, and the 2014 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Universe(s)

Books

• The Rule of Names (1964) · Earthsea Cycle Expanded Canon
• The Word of Unbinding (1964) · Earthsea Cycle Expanded Canon
• A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) · Earthsea Cycle Core Canon
• The Tombs of Atuan (1971) · Earthsea Cycle Core Canon
• The Farthest Shore (1972) · Earthsea Cycle Core Canon
• The Beginning Place (1980) · The Beginning Place Core Canon
• Tehanu (1990) · Earthsea Cycle Core Canon
• Tales from Earthsea (2001) · Earthsea Cycle Expanded Canon
• The Other Wind (2001) · Earthsea Cycle Core Canon
• Gifts (2004) · Annals of the Western Shore Core Canon
• Voices (2006) · Annals of the Western Shore Core Canon
• Powers (2007) · Annals of the Western Shore Core Canon
• Lavinia (2008) · Lavinia Core Canon
• The Daughter of Odren (2014) · Earthsea Cycle Expanded Canon
• Firelight (2018) · Earthsea Cycle Expanded Canon
• The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition (2018) · Earthsea Cycle Expanded Canon

Aggregate across all universes

These are separate, unrelated universes; the totals below are plain sums of already-published per-universe facts, never a blended or averaged score across them. See each universe's own figures above.

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 10 books
• Award recognitions across all universes: 14 (11 won, 1 finalist mention, 1 nomination, 1 honor mention)

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