This lecture will explore how with its focus on intuitive, experiential, and nature-based ways of knowing, Ursula K. Le Guin’s collected works inspire an embodied, decelerated approach to living and working. In a cultural-historical moment which places great value on speed, mental and spiritual well-being suffer, and the impact of poor decision-making threatens the future of every species on our planet. Novels such as The Wizard of Earthsea (1968), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Telling (2000) take readers into deep, contemplative spaces, where in order to travel alongside her protagonists, one must quiet the mind, engage the creative imagination, and open oneself up to the possibility that the answers to life’s most pressing questions are already here, inside us, if only we might remember how to listen.

Dr Liesl King is Deputy Head of School of Humanities, Religion and Philosophy at York St John University in York, England. Her PhD in English from the University of London, Queen Mary focuses on representations of gender and progressive spirituality in women’s science fiction and fantasy in the late twentieth century. Liesl is particularly interested in exploring the way in which science fiction enables readers to access secular and progressive spiritual perspectives. She is the Caretaker of the online magazine Terra Two: An Ark for Off-World Survival: yorkstjohnterratwo.com