

But if we could stop critics being ignorant, genre would be interesting." Le Guin, who also writes realist fiction, poetry, essays and books for young children, says: "I'm impatient with genre as a label of quality. Thirty years before Harry Potter, in A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), she sent Ged, also called Sparrowhawk, to a school for wizards in a pre-industrial archipelago of dragons and sorcerers governed by magic, death and the power of language.

In this gabled house in the Pacific north-west, her home for almost half a century, Le Guin conceived the parallel series that won her recognition as a Grand Master of both fantasy and science fiction. Her home in the west hills of Portland, above Oregon's Willamette river, has a spectacular view of Mount St Helens, which blew its top 25 years ago, but is now eerily tranquil. Ursula Le Guin finds inspiration for her powerfully imagined fantasy worlds in landscape as much as literature.
