“Apparently,” she will say, “I don’t mind living in the margins, because I’ve put myself there often enough. She frequently talks about herself as an object of wry or amused discovery. A fierce, waspish energy animates her as she listens and speaks, but for a writer she seems strikingly unneedy. Perhaps it takes a certain kind of temperament to absorb so much devotion and retain equanimity. The unwary might mistake her simply for the genial 84-year-old wife of a retired academic, a cat owner, who has lived quietly in the same house for half a century. “He’s more than welcome,” Le Guin says, when I relay my friend’s thanks.

You need to stay in Earthsea for as long as your imagination can float its little open boat. You need to get out of the surgical ward. But there are situations when what you need is teleportation. Escape is derided as the cheapest of literary pleasures, “escapism” the name for a particular kind of aesthetic cowardice, a culpable flight from the real. I don’t think he was being altogether rhetorical. “Reading the Earthsea trilogy saved my life,” he wrote to me. One of my friends, a Le Guin fan of great depth and seriousness, remembers being nine years old, in pain and distress as he recovered from open-heart surgery. This week, 40 years after the third Earthsea book, The Farthest Shore, won the National Book award in children’s literature, Le Guin has been awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, presented to her by Neil Gaiman in New York. Many readers discover her young, through her Earthsea sequence, now acknowledged as one of the great works of 20th-century fantasy. I have rarely gone to visit a writer bearing so many messages of love and admiration. I didn’t have to change myself into a hawk or cross over into the land of the dead. I am resisting the temptation to use the language of the quest here, or get into any dubious comparisons between writers and wizards or witches. There ought to be more adventure on such a journey than an airport security queue and a taxi rank. A bridge is being rebuilt and the road is broken by a steep drop, forcing me to pick my way along a trail down into a ravine, then back up the other side. Walking uphill towards her house I find the way spectacularly blocked. Ursula K Le Guin lives along a winding road in a suburb of Portland, Oregon.

Ursula k le guin tao te ching