“we will need writers who can remember freedom”: ursula k le guin at the national book awards

[AdamSmith]

She is so great. Her novel The Dispossessed blew my mind in high school. (Maybe not a hard thing to do, but still. ) http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed

"we will need writers who can remember freedom": ursula k le guin at the national book awards

posted on 19 november, 2014

Ursula K. Le Guin was honored at the National Book Awards tonight and gave a fantastic speech about the dangers to literature and how they can be stopped. As far as I know its not available online yet, so Ive transcribed it from the livestream below. The parts in parentheses were ad-libbed directly to the audience, and the Neil thanked is Neil Gaiman, who presented her with the award.

Thank you Neil, and to the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks from the heart. My family, my agent, editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as mine, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine. And I rejoice at accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long, my fellow authors of fantasy and science fictionwriters of the imagination, who for the last 50 years watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionariesthe realists of a larger reality.

Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. (Thank you, brave applauders.)

Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write. (Well, I love you too, darling.)

Books, you know, theyre not just commodities. The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our artthe art of words.

I have had a long career and a good one. In good company. Now here, at the end of it, I really dont want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing wantand should demandour fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.

Thank you.

http://parkerhiggins.net/2014/11/will-need-writers-can-remember-freedom-ursula-k-le-guin-national-book-awards/

[lookin]

Really good article, AdamSmith! Thanks.

[AdamSmith]

One more, an overview of her work:

https://review.oysterbooks.com/x6Maq5Nesqo5Dg8ZExqSaM/ursula-k-le-guin

[AdamSmith]

Ursula Le Guin: 'Wizardry is artistry'

As Ursula Le Guin receives the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the National Book Awards, she talks to Hari Kunzru about alternative fictional worlds

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/20/ursula-le-guin-wizardry-is-artistry-interview-national-book-awards

[RA1]

Blowing your mind is likely not what I would have on my mind.

Best regards,

RA1