Ursula K. Le Guin

Born in Berkeley in 1929 to two anthropologists, Ursula Kroeber earned a master's in French, started a doctorate, then dropped it after marrying historian Charles Le Guin in 1953. She began writing full-time in the late 1950s, publishing her first work in 1959. A Wizard of Earthsea arrived in 1968 with dark-skinned protagonists in a genre that rarely imagined them; The Left Hand of Darkness followed in 1969, winning her both major awards and making her the first woman to do so. Over nearly sixty years she wrote more than twenty novels and a hundred short stories, always pulling from anthropology, Taoism, and Jung - anthropologists often narrated her worlds, balance and equilibrium structured the conflicts. "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" in 1973 and the anarchist novel The Dispossessed in 1974 carved out new political territory for speculative fiction. She collected eight Hugos, six Nebulas, twenty-five Locus Awards, and the National Book Foundation medal before her death in January 2018, leaving Michael Chabon to call her "the greatest American writer of her generation."