We are delighted to welcome a group of scholars to discuss the work and maps of Ursula K. Le Guin, in celebration of the release of The Word For World from Silver Press.
So Mayer, co-editor of The Word For World, joins Drs Matthew Sangster, Phil Crockett Thomas, and Taylor Driggers, a recent recipient of the Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship, for a discussion of the work and legacy of one of speculative fiction's undoubted Grand Masters, Ursula K. Le Guin, through the lens of her maps.
So Mayer is a writer, editor, bookseller and organiser. Their most recent book is Bad Language, out from Peninsula Press in November 2025, and with Sarah Shin, they are the co-editor of Space Crone and The Word For World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin, both for Silver Press.
Matthew Sangster is Professor of Romantic Studies, Fantasy and Cultural History at the University of Glasgow, where he co-directs the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic. He is the author of An Introduction to Fantasy (2023), which won the 2024 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Myth and Fantasy Studies. He was one of the curators of the British Library's 'Fantasy: Realms of Imagination' exhibition (2023-24) and co-edited the exhibition's companion volume, Realms of Imagination: Essays from the Wide Worlds of Fantasy (2023), with Tanya Kirk.
Taylor Driggers is the Mythopoeic Award-nominated author of Queering Faith in Fantasy Literature and Advisory Editor of the forthcoming History of Earthsea series from Evertype. He is an independent scholar based in Glasgow specialising in fantasy fiction, queer studies, and theology and religion (not always in that order). In 2024, he was awarded a Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship from the University of Oregon to fund research on fantasy and hidden queer kinships in the archive, which is the topic of his next book. Taylor holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow.
Phil Crockett Thomas writes fiction and poetry, and teaches sociology and criminology at the University of Stirling. Her research focuses on social harm, justice, and creative and collaborative methods. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Ambit and on BBC Radio 4. She is the editor of Abolition Science Fiction (2022) a collection of creative writing by activists and scholars involved in the movement for prison abolition in the U.K, and of The Moon Spins the Dead Prison (2022) with Thomas Abercromby and Rosie Roberts.
