Ursula K. Le Guin Stamps

The 33rd stamp in the Literary Arts series honors Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018), who expanded the scope of literature through novels and short stories that increased critical and popular appreciation of science fiction and fantasy. In fiction informed by her lifelong interests in mythology, anthropology, feminism, and Taoism, as well as through her wide-ranging translations, essays, poetry, and nonfiction, Le Guin demonstrated that no writer needed to be limited by the boundaries of any genre.

The stamp features a portrait of Le Guin based on a 2006 photograph. The background shows a scene from her landmark 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness , in which an envoy from Earth named Genly Ai escapes from a prison camp across the wintry planet of Gethen with Estraven, a disgraced Gethenian politician.

Le Guin earned acclaim in 1968 with A Wizard of Earthsea , a novel about the hard-won education of a young wizard on a vast archipelago. The following year, she published The Left Hand of Darkness , an award-winning novel about an Earth diplomat who journeys to a wintry planet where two nations teeter on the brink of war—and where the inhabitants have no fixed gender most of the time. Skillfully interweaving science, anthropology, folklore, mysticism, and the perspectives of multiple characters, The Left Hand of Darkness is often praised as the work that permanently raised the literary expectations for science fiction.