Ursula Le Guin is the daughter of an anthropologist and an author, and although she is a rather private person, whatever other hidden influences there may have been, these were surely strong ones.

Her work is always intensely interesting and usually very creative. Le Guin has a knack for taking an idea and creating a society, a culture, and placing some new influence in it to see what happens. She doesn't only deal with the effects on the individual either, but the wide-ranging effects on the whole world she has created.

Having read an interview where she was discussing her disappointment with the Earthsea miniseries, and in particular the way that they had transformed her main character, who has red-brown skin, and friends into white people, something struck me about her work that hadn't before. She does include people of various colours in her books. Not as anomalies, or to drive some social agenda, they just are sometimes. It's done so casually that it's like discovering the character has long hair or a flat nose, and the impression I've been left with isn't so much that she's doing something unusual, which in many ways she is, but that other authors have really forgotten something fairly basic.

People do come in different colours, and in a world where everyone is hermaphoditic, or someone can dream a new reality, that really isn't much of a consideration. But I thought I'd mention it, in case you didn't notice....

It isn't surprising that Le Guin has won an enormous number of awards for her writing, including being the first to win both the Hugo and the Nebula for two different novels. She is a writer who brings to the reader the perspective of the strange and the alien, and contrasts it with the familiar and common. I have never walked away from reading her work without feeling as though I have been stimulated both intellectually and emotionally, and if you haven't read her work yet, I highly recommend you do.