Ursula K. Le Guin

She preferred American novelist to science fiction writer, and the preference was an argument rather than snobbery: the genre label kept sending readers to her for the wrong reasons. Her first publication came in 1959 and the career ran nearly sixty years, producing more than twenty novels, more than a hundred short stories, poetry, criticism, translations and children's books.

Two bodies of work dominate. The Hainish novels use interstellar anthropology as a thought experiment, dropping an observer into a society organised around one changed assumption and letting the consequences do the arguing. The Earthsea books do something rarer for fantasy: they take a boy's magical education seriously enough to make his talent the problem rather than the solution, then keep returning across decades to interrogate what the earlier volumes had assumed, particularly about who holds power and who was left out of it.

What she is exceptionally good at is the sentence. The prose is plain, weighted and slightly formal, closer to a translated saga than to genre convention, and it carries the load that other writers hand to exposition. She won Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards, and by the end she was being read as a moralist and a stylist rather than a genre specialist. She died in 2018.