She won the Hugo Award again in 1973 for "The Word for World is Forest". The book was influenced by Le Guin's anger over the Vietnam War, and explored themes of colonialism and militarism: Le Guin later described it as the "most overt political statement" she had made in a fictional work.
Her 1974 novel "The Dispossessed" again won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards for best novel, making her the first person to win both awards for each of two books. Also set in the Hainish universe, the story explored anarchism and utopianism. Scholar Charlotte Spivack said Le Guin was making her science fiction writing more about discussing political ideas.
Several of her speculative fiction short stories from the period, including her first published story, were later anthologized in the 1975 collection "The Wind's Twelve Quarters". The fiction of the period 1966 to 1974, which also included "The Lathe of Heaven", the Hugo Award-winning "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas" and the Nebula Award-winning "The Day Before the Revolution", constitutes Le Guin's best-known body of work.
Le Guin published the novel "Lavinia" in 2008. Lavinia is a character from Virgil's "Aeneid",
The "Annals of the Western Shore" was a series of three books: "Gifts" (2004), "Voices" (2006), and "Powers" (2007). Each book has a different main character and happens in a different place. But, the books all share some characters and places."Gifts" won the PEN Center USA 2005 Children's literature award. "Powers" won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2009.
Near the end of her life, Le Guin wrote less fiction. She wrote essays, poems, and some translations. Her last publications included the non-fiction collections "Dreams Must Explain Themselves" and "Ursula K Le Guin: Conversations on Writing". She also wrote a book of poetry called "So Far So Good: Final Poems 2014–2018". These were released after she died.
Many other writiers influenced Le Guin.
Cultural anthropology was important to her writing.
Carl Jung's archetypes may be seen in her work.
Taoism was part of Le Guin's life and work.
The story of "The Dispossessed" happens on twin planets called Urras and Anarres. Urras was richer than Anarres. But Anarres is more advanced ethically and morally. Sttlers from Urras planned the Anarres society. It is an anarcho-socialist society that is an "ambiguous utopia". Anarres society is neither perfect nor static, unlike classical utopias. The main character, Shevek, travels to Urras to do research. Urras society is authoritarian, hierarchical, and misogynistic. But these the anarchists on Anarres do not have those problems. In their society cooperation and individual liberty are most important.
Le Guin became popular and got good reviews quickly after publishing "The Left Hand of Darkness" in 1969. She was very well known among SF writers by the 1970s. Readers bought millions of her books. And, her writing was translated into more than 40 languages. Some of her books stayed in print many decades after their first publication. Academics studied her work carefully and discussed it often. Later in her career, mainstream literary critics wrote positively about her work. In an obituary, Jo Walton said that Le Guin "was so good that the mainstream couldn't dismiss SF any more".
Le Guin earliest work stayed the most popular and got the most recognition. A reviewer in 2018 said that she often lectured the reader in her later works. John Clute, wrote in "The Guardian", that she felt responsible for explaining important things clearly, and that this was difficult for her. Some critics disliked some of her work. "The Compass Rose" had a mixed reaction. Even the critically well-received "The Left Hand of Darkness" was criticized by some feminists.
Other authors liked her work. According to Zadie Smith, her prose was "as elegant and beautiful as any written in the twentieth century". After Le Guin's death in 2018, writer Michael Chabon called her the "greatest American writer of her generation", and said that she had "awed [him] with the power of an unfettered imagination". Author Margaret Atwood praised Le Guin's "sane, smart, crafty and lyrical voice", and wrote that social injustice was a powerful motivation through Le Guin's life. Literary critic Harold Bloom described Le Guin as an "exquisite stylist", saying that in her writing, "Every word was exactly in place and every sentence or line had resonance". According to Bloom, Le Guin was a "visionary who set herself against all brutality, discrimination, and exploitation".
Academic and author Joyce Carol Oates highlighted Le Guin's "outspoken sense of justice, decency, and common sense", and called her "one of the great American writers and a visionary artist whose work will long endure". China Miéville described Le Guin as a "literary colossus", and wrote that she was a "writer of intense ethical seriousness and intelligence, of wit and fury, of radical politics, of subtlety, of freedom and yearning".
Praise for Le Guin frequently focused on the social and political themes her work explored. "The New York Times" described her as using "a lean but lyrical style" to explore issues of moral relevance. In the introduction to an interview in 2008, "Vice" magazine described Le Guin as having written "some of the more mind-warping sf and fantasy tales of the past 40 years".
Le Guin won many annual awards for individual works. She was nominated for Hugo Awards twenty-four times and won seven times. She won six Nebula Awards from eighteen nominations. Four of her Nebula Awards were for Best Novel, more than any other writer. Le Guin won twenty-two Locus Awards. Her third Earthsea novel, "The Farthest Shore", won the 1973 National Book Award for Young People's Literature, She was a finalist for ten Mythopoeic Awards, nine in Fantasy and one for Scholarship. Her 1996 collection "Unlocking the Air and Other Stories" was one of three finalists for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Other awards won by Le Guin include three James Tiptree Jr. Awards, two World Fantasy Awards, and three Jupiter Awards. She won her final Hugo and Locus awards in the year of her death, for the essay collection "No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters", and an anthology of the Hainish cycle, respectively.
Other awards were for Le Guin's contributions to speculative fiction. She was voted a Gandalf Grand Master Award by the World Science Fiction Society in 1979. The Science Fiction Research Association gave her its Pilgrim Award in 1989 for her "lifetime contributions to SF and fantasy scholarship". At the 1995 World Fantasy Convention she won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. She became a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2001. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America made her its 20th Grand Master in 2003. She was the second, and as of 2019, one of only six women to receive that honor. In 2010, Le Guin was awarded the Lyman Tower Sargent Distinguished Scholar Award by the North American Society for Utopian Studies. In 2013, she was given the Eaton Award by the University of California, Riverside, for lifetime achievement in science fiction.