About UKL

Ursula K. Le Guin was born October 21, 1929 in Berkeley, California, in the family of anthropologists. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951. Before turning to sci-fi and fantasy, Le Guin used to write poetry and novels about a fictional European country called Orsini. Those were later collected into Tales of Orsini (1976) and the novel Malafrena ( 1979). Her professional career started in 1961 with a story An die Musik, set in the Orsini universe. A year later, her first sci-fi story was published in the Fantastic magazine. Since then she has won numerous literary awards for novels and short fiction.

Le Guin's most famous works include the Earthsea fantasy series and the Hainish Cycle science fiction series.

Hain is a very interesting and unique world. It's a hypothetical supercivilization, the "mother" of all intelligent life in the Galaxy. It has its own original Galactic Federation named League of Worlds (or the Ekumen), based mostly on the principles of humanism and non-interference. League of Worlds does not rule or order, but only coordinates and watches the development of other civilizations.

The Earthsea series started with a short story The Word of Unbinding (1964) and turned into an epic saga. Ursula Le Guin published six novels and eight short stories set in this universe. The books have sold millions of copies in the US and England, and have been translated into sixteen languages.

The world of Earthsea is technologically an early Iron Age society. The world consists of various islands inhabited by different peoples, who pray to different gods. The key elements of this world is magic, i.e. the magic of "true names", the language of truth which is spoken by the dragons. In Earthsea, wizards are involved in every aspect of human life.