I note the passing of Ursula K Le Guin, who was one of the towering beacons of speculative fiction. From the mid-1960s she wrote a range of works that were imaginative, radical and influential. I’ve read a reasonable number of them, although far from the whole canon, including one that I had the pleasure of finding on the reading list for one of the courses in my history degree (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)).

I am a little cautious when I see death notices on the Internet – it is not unknown for them to be greatly exaggerated. However, confirmed by the author’s own Twitter feed, I think this one can probably be trusted as fact.