Updated: Dec 11, 2003. If my life depended on naming any one writer among a myriad as my "favourite", it would have to be Ursula K. Le Guin.
This storyteller from Oregon has been a wise friend and constant companion down the decades almost since the thumb came out of my mouth and I found real pleasure in reading words of more than two syllables for myself.
When French publishers took even a fine translation of Ursula's 'Earthsea Quartet' out of print for several years, just as the Kid was approaching an age to enjoy this one of her many worlds, I was furious.
"They'll be back," one store assistant told me. "They can't not be! Except of course for 'Tehanu'. That was rubbish compared to the rest, don't you think?"
"I most certainly don't! Why on earth do you say that?"
"Well, who's really interested in a wizard who has lost all his power? The last one is boring because it just doesn't have the magic of the others."
"Mmm. I think you may have missed the point!"
Anyway, the Quartet did come back, with 'Tehanu' in its rightful place alongside its predecessors. And the Kid was soon as hooked as I was 30 years ago.
Once her English is up to it, I'll invite her to explore more of Le Guin's several imaginative domains and the poetry too; she's already made a passing acquaintance with another of those parallel universes, the Ekumen of the Known Worlds.

Parallel? Oh yes. Though neatly labelled by over-ordered minds as a "fantasy and science fiction writer," there's not a novel or short story in all her prolific work where Ursula isn't really writing about us, our human condition and other creatures with whom we share our fragile world, however far she may seem to steer her words into other dimensions and remote places and times.
I've just finished 'The Telling' (2001; Gollancz, out in paperback last year). The cover of my copy calls it "a novel of the Hainish", but that's a misleading description serving merely to situate the tale in one of Le Guin's mental spaces.
The Hainish play only a small part in a story about Sutty, an Observer of Anglo-Hindu origin who is granted permission by the rulers on Aka, a government known as the Corporation, to leave the capital on an exploratory mission to a backwoods town in the foothills of a soaring mountain range.
While to Corporation officials whose planet is a newcomer to Ursula's Ekumen community of worlds, Okzat-Ozkat may be a backwards place by a remote upstream stretch of river, Sutty swiftly starts to discover more than she expected.
Within a few days, she has begun to meet the "maz", the "tellers" of the town, sometimes physicians, sometimes teachers, sometimes akin to the priests of our Terra. All are guardians of banned traditions, old calligraphy and a history white-washed off the very walls of Aka's brave new egalitarian world of consumer-producers.
Sutty bears a painful past of her own. On the earth she left, the proselytising religions and superstitions effaced on Aka in the name of scientific progress had gained the upper hand, bringing fanaticism, book-burning — and the violent death of the love of her life.
It's not until she is given leave to extend her stay in the hinterland and travel up into the mountains that Sutty comes to face up to her own true enemy, in the shape of a zealous Corporation official, the Monitor initially tasked to spy on her.