The book’s lead character, Ged, ends up being a student at Roke under the tutoring of 9 master wizards, each of whom may have assisted affect, at least in a faint sense, the teachers of Harry Potter’s college of wizardry and witchcraft. This was constantly my favored part of the tale. Long prior to Hogwarts, Le Guin offered us the wizarding school of Roke. Le Guin died in January 2018, at the age of 88.Re- reading this publication recommended me of simply just how much it impacted dream fiction moving forward. The documentary makers, who funded the film with a combination of a grant and crowdfunding from more than 3,000 backers, describe Le Guin as an author who “defiantly held her ground on the margin of American letters until the sheer excellence of her work, at long last, forced the mainstream to embrace fantastic literature”. That was the original, the finest and the best,” Gaiman says in the documentary, adding: “What Ursula was having to navigate was the societal prejudices against science fiction, against the fantastic, and against children’s fiction. “I don’t think Harry Potter could have existed without Earthsea.

The documentary also features conversations with authors Michael Chabon, David Mitchell and Neil Gaiman, who credits Le Guin’s 1968 novel The Wizard of Earthsea, about a wizard at a magical school, with inspiring Harry Potter. If I can’t publish anything except for the occasional poem in a tiny, tiny poetry magazine what am I doing? Am I kidding myself?” I was beginning to feel a little desperate. Le Guin tells Curry: “When I started writing, the basic assumption about fiction was that men were at the centre of it … I don’t know how many times I was told I write well, but, ‘we don’t know quite what you’re doing’.

But here you have a book that we feel, regretfully, would be of interest to very few American readers,” and “the basic subject matter and background is so remote that I could not encourage you to recast it from a practical point of view”, and “there would not be a large enough audience for a novel of this kind”.

Rejection letters from publishers in the 50s tell her, variously: “You write well and are obviously very erudite. All of a sudden we are seeing Earthsea … from the point of view of the powerless.”Īlthough Le Guin won many awards during her lifetime, the documentary – which will premiere on 10 June at the Sheffield Doc/Fest – reveals her initial struggle to be published. “What I’d been doing as a writer was being a woman pretending to think like a man … I had to rethink my entire approach to writing fiction … it was important to think about privilege and power and domination, in terms of gender, which was something science fiction and fantasy had not done,” Le Guin tells Curry. The trailer for Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin.

Ursula le guin a wizard of earthsea