First she made a joke about being shorter than the other people at the podium. Then she told the audience that she was sharing her award —the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters — with fellow fantasy and science-fiction writers. Then Ursula LeGuin said this:
I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of
writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through
our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways
of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope.
We will need
writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a
larger reality. Right now, I think we need writers who know the
difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of
an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We
live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right
of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings;
resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the
art of words.
I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company,
and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American
literature get sold down the river. … The name of our beautiful reward
is not profit. Its name is freedom.
Within an hour I was at the library checking out three books by Ursula Le Guin. Here's a writer whose voice I want to read.
