Ursula K. Le Guin

Daughter of the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber, Le Guin grew up steeped in the ethnography of California's Indigenous peoples, a sensibility she carried into her invented anthropologies of imagined worlds. She met her husband, the historian Charles Le Guin, on a Fulbright-funded voyage to France, and the couple settled in Portland, Oregon, where she raised three children while writing.

Her Earthsea books, beginning with A Wizard of Earthsea, remade children's fantasy around a dragon-haunted archipelago and a brown-skinned hero decades before that was common. The Hainish novels, including The Dispossessed, used science fiction's furthest reaches to run thought experiments on anarchism, gender, and utopia.

She spent her later career arguing, in essays and public lectures, against literary fiction's condescension toward genre, accepting a National Book Foundation medal in 2014 with a speech denouncing publishers who valued profit over writers. She died in Portland in 2018.