‘Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.’
Ursula K Le Guin, 2014
Today, for no other reason than it’s in my mind, here is the speech given by Ursula K. Le Guin when accepting the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014. Her words had a particular meaning to the audience of writers and publishers but they resonate today with wider and still more urgent sense.
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, 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. Very often in our art, the art of words.
Ursula K Le Guin, 2014
You can watch her deliver the speech with grace and humour on the Ursula K. Le Guin website. She says more in five minutes than most of us can in fifty.
Image by Marion Wood Kolisch, © 1988, Courtesy Portland Art Museum
François Matarasso 