Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, in 1929, the daughter of the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber. Her work was first published in 1959, and she broke through at the end of the 1960s with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). The second, about an envoy sent to the ice planet Gethen, whose people have no fixed sex, made her the first woman to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel.

Anthropology, Taoism, feminism and the writings of Carl Jung all shaped her fiction. She often turned genre conventions around, giving Earthsea dark-skinned protagonists, and used stories to test other ways of organizing a society: The Dispossessed (1974) is an anarchist utopian novel, and 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' (1973) a short philosophical story. Over nearly sixty years she published more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, plus poetry, criticism, translations and children's books. She won eight Hugo and six Nebula awards, and in 2014 received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She died in 2018.

For fantasy, start with A Wizard of Earthsea, a short novel about the young wizard Ged, and continue through the series in order. The first three books (1968–1972) work as a complete trilogy; the later ones, begun nearly twenty years afterward, make most sense once you have finished it. For science fiction, start with The Left Hand of Darkness, then read The Dispossessed. Neither requires any other Hainish book.

If you want a quicker way in, The Lathe of Heaven (1971), first serialized in Amazing Stories, is a short standalone that sits outside both series. Readers who like experimental structure can later try Always Coming Home (1985), but it is not a first book.