Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) is one of the United States’ most honored and respected authors, in or out of the fields of science fiction and fantasy in which she often wrote. Her oeuvre includes 21 novels and dozens of volumes of short stories, children’s books, poetry, essays and translation. Learn more

News and happenings

United States Postal Service honors Ursula with a new postage stamp as part of its Literary Masters series.

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, winner of Outstanding Story from the Women in Film Festival, streams on Kanopy and PBS American Masters’ in some markets.

Minotauro issues new trade paperback edition of Lavinia, Le Guin’s 2008 novel centered on the character from Virgil’s epic poem the Aeneid.

Follow @ursulaleguin on Twitter and @ursulakleguin on Instagram for news and other tidbits.

Reading Ursula

A Meditation on Marriage

From my California, my great land
of gold and complications, wilderness,
enormous cities built on faults,
austere, bizarre, and inexhaustible
vineyards, valleys crowded with visions,

to your Georgia of red dirt
farms, where trees are all one green,
a bony piny sandy silence,
your Georgia of slow rivers, graves,
islands, that quiet place,

how could I come with all my California?

I see them come with open hands,
transparent, sharing everything,
giving and cleaving, nothing kept,”
the emigrants that leave their motherland
for love and never look behind.

But if I would how could I give you
California? And I have to live
there, working the creeks my veins for gold.
Or you, could you leave Georgia,
leaving your bones behind,
and give me more than silence?

So we have made these no-one’s-lands
by meeting where we never know
when we shall meet or not,
like spies or pioneers,
telling the news in low voices
down in the willow coulees
in a grey evening, inland.

We met at sea, we married
in a foreign language: what wonder
if we cross a continent on foot
each time to find each other

at secret borders, bringing
of all my streams and darknesses of gold
and your deep graves and islands
a feather
a flake of mica
a willow leaf
that is our country,
ours alone.