The Left Hand of Darkness | Author Biography

Ursula K. LeGuin
Ursula K. LeGuin

Ursula K. Le Guin was born on October 29, 1929, in Berkeley, California, where she grew up. Her father was Alfred Kroeber, an internationally-known anthropologist whose influence may have nurtured her understanding of cultural artifacts and traditional myths and legends. Her mother, Theodora Kracaw Kroeber Quinn, was a writer of several biographies and children's books. Le Guin attended Radcliffe College, where she received her B.A., and Columbia University, where she received a master's degree in romance literatures of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. She married Charles A. Le Guin, a French historian, in 1953. Her first short stories appeared in science fiction magazines as early as 1962, and she published three novels, including the first one in her acclaimed Earthsea trilogy, in the three years between 1966 and 1968. It was The Left Hand of Darkness, though, that made her famous, winning the major science fiction awards: in 1969 the book won the Nebula Award, and in 1970 it earned her a Hugo Award. She has defined herself as a feminist, but not a radical feminist: she has spoken out for women's rights in life and, as in The Left Hand of Darkness, she has studied the roles of the genders in her science fiction, but most of her protagonists have been males, especially in her early books. One of the earliest lessons she learned in regard to self-identity and gender came in the same year that this book was published, when Playboy magazine published her story "Nine Lives." They asked her to publish it under the name "U. K. Le Guin": she did it, but she went on to resent having had to hide who she was. In her career Le Guin has published over eighty short stories, two collections of essays, ten books for children, seven volumes of poetry, and sixteen novels. She has written a screenplay for The Left Hand of Darkness that has not yet been produced.