Photo © Marian Wood Kolisch

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of my favorite writers and was a remarkable human being. Though best known as a fantasy and science fiction writer, she was fantastically prolific, writing novels, short stories, poems, and essays on a wide range of topics. Her Earthsea series, which she expanded to six books over the course of several decades, is unique among fantasy stories and is one of my favorite works of literature. Study questions for the first book, A Wizard of Earthsea, have been featured on Camilla’s English Page since its inception, but I just added two new pages to the site with background information and additional resources: a page for Wizard and a page for The Tombs of Atuan (the second book of the series), with brand-new study questions for Tombs and a writing assignment that can be used with either book. If you love good fantasy stories, or even if you just enjoy well-written literature, I highly recommend these books. I hope you’ll enjoy the novels and find the materials useful!

I’ll also take this opportunity to plug The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition, which was published last year. It contains all of her Earthsea-related writings and features beautiful Le Guin-approved illustrations by Charles Vess. For anyone who loves the Earthsea stories as much as I do, this volume is a treasure.