Q: Have you ever considered allowing Earthsea to be filmed? A writer, an artist whose medium is words, is likely to find the idea of magic as naming, words as power, a quite natural one. I read Lady Frazier's Leaves from the Golden Bough as a kid, and probably met it there. UKL: It's a very old idea in magic, all over the world. Q: Where did the idea of discovering 'true names' as a means to powerful magic come from? Do you know what fired you to include it in the Earthsea books as such a central theme? When so many adult critics were carrying on about the 'incredible originality' of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled it seemed a lively kid's fantasy crossed with a 'school novel', good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.

Q: Nicholas Lezard has written 'Rowling can type, but Le Guin can write.' What do you make of this comment in the light of the phenomenal success of the Potter books? I'd like to hear your opinion of JK Rowling's writing style Some writers can use dream fairly directly as story source, as Stevenson did in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but I do better when awake. Of course a dream can change the way one thinks and acts, as Phil Dick's dream or vision changed his thinking.

UKL: No, I don't think dreams change reality (I really am fairly sane). Are any of your novels based on dreams you have had? Do you think dreams play any part in influencing our reality? Philip K Dick is said to have had a vision that formed many of his later views and ideas, as explored in Valis. Q: The book also deals with the power of one man's dreams in determining reality.

Always coming home ursula le guin