24 January,2018 05:15 AM IST | New York | Agencies
Ursula K Le Guin, the award-winning US science fiction and fantasy author, and avowed feminist whose books have sold millions worldwide, has died, her family has announced. 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 on Monday. "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.
Le Guin published her first novel, "Rocannon's World," in 1966 but found breakthrough success with the publication in 1969 of "The Left Hand of Darkness," which won a litany of prizes and became a great science fiction classic.
The novel, the beginning of the Hainish Cycle which contains six other titles, broke with the sclerotic patterns of science fiction's golden age.
