1. Your readers are very excited at the publication of the first full-length Hainish novel in over 20 years. What inspired "The Telling"?

There really is no twenty-year gap; I have gone on with the "Hainish" series pretty steadily, in short stories and novellas and the book "Four Ways to Forgiveness," four linked stories that give the same broad picture of a place and times as a novel would do. I thought "The Telling" was going to be a novella too, but it insisted on being a novel. Its most obvious sources of inspiration (if that's the word) are the Cultural Revolution in China, and the ride of fundamentalist religiosity around the world in the last few decades.

2. Of all the worlds you have created, do you have a favorite?

Do I have a favorite world? No; though I always love being able to go back to Earthsea. But I have been in the Oregon high desert this year, and on Cannon Beach at sunset, and in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, and can only say, the imagination is a wonderful thing, but what the Earth can think up is beyond all our dreams...

3. What and who do you count as major influences on your writing?

Major influences. Oh, everything I ever saw, did, read, heard and felt! Writing is (as Gary Snyder put it) composting. Let's not try to find out what's in that muck in the compost bin; do we really want to know? Add some worms and shut the lid. What's important is what grows from it.

4. Has living in the Pacific Northwest played a role in your writing?

Influence of the Pacific Northwest on writing---sure! California is my first earth, Oregon my second, and longest. All my work is full of the western landscape, the hills, the forests, the deserts, the light. In my books, the sun always sets in the ocean...

5. I don't think enough has been said about how darn funny your books can be. And I guess that means you are, too! (Starbrew!???!)I think your books have made me laugh as well as cry. I am just realizing this isn't a question, but I wanted to say it.

I am glad you said my stuff can be funny. I roll around laughing sometimes writing it, and then the critics come on and they are so damned serious and talk about Discourses and Epiphanies and Battles of Good and Evil and all that.--I remember trying to show the script writer for "Lathe of Heaven" that the book was essentially comic. His script was quite humorless. Heavy-handed. So the poor guy laboriously stuck in some bad jokes, and we had to take them out again.--Humor is a chancy thing; and when it's an element of a serious book, a lot of people just miss it, perhaps because they don't expect complexity, and there isn't a laugh track...

6. You have won many prrestigious awards. What does winning the PNBA Lifetime Achievement Award mean to you?

No matter how sure you are that you've written a good book, getting a big lollipop that says GOOD BOOK! on it is a tremendous validation and a moral support for the unsure times. It's great to have some laurels to rest on while you get your courage up. To a young writer of course such recognition is often vitally important. This PNBA is important to me in a differrent way. For one thing, it's regional, it's Western, and I'm a Westerner. I am not interested in the prizes and kudos of the closed-circuit Eastern literary establishment, except as they affect my younger writer friends. But Western writing, publishing, criticism--that matters to me!Then there is the fact that this award comes late in my life' I'm 71, they've gone and changed millennia on me, and I don't even have a modem, how can anybody under 70 give a hoot about what I say? I might as well write it in cuneiform. But then I get this tremendous support in the unsure times, the times when you're trying something you haven't tried before and think who on earth is going to read this stuff if i can finish it before I'm either drooling or dead?

7. This is something independent booksellers are always interested in. What are you reading?

What am I reading now? I just finished Mail Suri's "Death of Vishnu", a marvelous novel, and started Arturo Perez-Reverte's "The Fencing Master", which is diappointing--violet eyes? oh, give me a break. I am slowly reading in Spanish a biography of Gabriela Mistral, whose poetry I'm in the process of translating. And my husband and I read aloud to each other in the evening, and are presently in the middle of E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India", which I read first in my teens, and many times since. Reading is a joy, re-reading is a double-triple, multiple joy.

8. The death of books/libraries plays a role in "The Telling". What do you think is the future of the book?

The future of the book? Well, if the corporations who own the publishers don't wise up, we'll go on with fewer and fewer books getting published and more and more bestsellers and other bookoid commodities. The triumph of corporate capitalism is not a healthy envirnment for writers, dancers, painters, tigers, salmon, trees, independent publishers, and other living things; but we will survive, or anyhow some of us will. And when the nerds who design e-stuff finally begin to become word-literate, then we'll have all kinds of neat and convenient new ways to read and to get at the informational content of books, which for some people will render the books, as a physical object, obsolete. If information is what's wanted, cyberspace is the place. But because the value of many books cannot be defined as information, and cannot be tansferred into other media, or even into other words--and because the book as a technology, an artifact, is a marvelous piece of design, doing exactly what it's wanted to do in a perfectly convenient and accessible and durable way--I think people will go on wanting and having books. They may be home print-outs, if the dream of a universal, universally accessible electronic library becomes fact: but they will be, in one form or antoher, books. Not everybody will want them. Not everybody ever wanted books. Really not very many people at all ever wanted books, right? How many Americans once out of school own any books? We have always been a minority and and endangered species, we people of the book. That's why we meet and tell each other how wonderful we are.