The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin

Name: The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin
Start: 2025-10-10T16:00:00.000Z
Location: AA Lecture Hall, 36 Bedford Square

Date
10 October 2025

Time
4.00 PM

Location
AA Lecture Hall, 36 Bedford Square

An afternoon of conversations and readings to celebrate the launch of The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K Le Guin.

When Ursula K Le Guin was writing a new story, she would begin by drawing a map. The Word for World, a book co-published by Spiral House (a new imprint of Silver Press) and AA Publications, brings Le Guin’s maps together with poems, stories, interviews, recipes and essays by contributors from a variety of perspectives to enquire into the relationship between worlds and how they are represented and imagined.

Join us for an afternoon of conversations and readings from contributors of the new publication, including Federico Campagna, Standard Deviation, Bhanu Kapil, So Mayer, Una McCormack, Nisha Ramayya, Sarah Shin and Marilyn Strathern. The discussions will be followed by The Word for World exhibition opening from 6pm onwards in the AA Gallery and Lecture Hall, where the new book will be for sale.

Federico Campagna is an Italian philosopher based in London, UK. He is the author of Otherworlds: Mediterranean Lessons on Escaping History (Bloomsbury, 2025), Prophetic Culture (Bloomsbury, 2021), Technic and Magic (Bloomsbury, 2018) and The Last Night (Zer0 Books, 2013). He works as a lecturer at the Architectural Association (London) and at ECAL (Lausanne). He is the co-founder of the Italian philosophy publisher Timeo, and a director at the US/UK radical publisher Verso.

Standard Deviation is a multidisciplinary collective weaving geometric, psychic and inhabited spaces. Led by Sammy Lee, Mark Lowe and Sarah Shin, with Federico Campagna, MJ Harding and Rain Wu, they explore nested realities and altered states through elliptical modes, including intuition, quantum, dreams, myth and higher dimensions.

Bhanu Kapil is Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, where she has been writing [with] [near] [alongside] the archive of Enoch Powell. A new book, Autobiography of a Performance, co-written with Blue Pieta, will be published by the87press in 2025. The co-researcher for The Clearing is Asha Lata Kapil, the author's mother, who contributed the translated lyrics of her own song, composed in Urdu, the story of a bear in a shattered cave at the center of a star, ongoing facts about butterflies, and the memory of a churan her own mother used to make. The three berries: harar (a kind of catkin), baher (a hard, greyish berry with red cheeks), and amla (olive). The idea for a forest that dreams itself comes from Ursula K Le Guin’s conception of the Athshean forest. The presence of an eternal ancestor encountered in the clearing, or waiting there, comes from a dream of Hanuman, the monkey god, in old age, her beard hanging down to her waist. Perhaps the mandala, the quick memory of that dream, is a way of dreaming while awake, Le Guin’s proposition once more.

So Mayer is a writer, editor, bookseller and organiser. With Sarah Shin, they co-edited Ursula K Le Guin, Space Crone (Silver Press, 2023), winner of the 2024 Locus Award for Non-Fiction. They are the author of two works of creative non-fiction, Bad Language (Peninsula, 2025) and A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing (Peninsula, 2020); a Republic of Consciousness-longlisted collection of speculative (non)-fiction, Truth & Dare (Cipher, 2023); and poetry projects including The God Files: Yentling (2024) with Sarah Crewe, raising funds for #Valentines4Palestine. They are the editor of catflap #5 for Outburst Arts, and of Culture Club, the webzine of queer feminist film curation collective Club Des Femmes.

Una McCormack is a bestselling and BSFA award-winning science fiction writer who has written more than 20 novels. An associate fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge, her academic interests include feminist science fiction, transformative works, and creative writing practice and methodology. She is on the editorial board of Gold SF, an imprint of Goldsmiths Press aimed at publishing new voices in intersectional feminist science fiction, and is a trustee of the Science Fiction Foundation. A former lecturer in creative writing, she continues to mentor writers, particularly those working towards completing their first novel. Her column Dancing in the Library, in which she reads through the Library of America edition of the works of Le Guin, is currently appearing in Interzone magazine.

Nisha Ramayya works across poetry, criticism, and collaborative performance, and teaches creative writing. She is the author of two poetry collections, States of the Body Produced by Love (Ignota, 2019; reissued by Spiral House Editions in 2025) and Fantasia (Granta, 2024), as well as the co-authored pamphlets Threads and Siblings, among other publications.

Sarah Shin explores dreams, myth, cosmic speculation and transformation through writing, research, publishing, curation and creation. Her current collaborations include: with Irene Revell, the Bodies of Sound book and curatorial project; with Sammy Lee, Mirror, a video game that journeys through a mythical world of correspondences; and Concrete Poetry with Mark Lowe. She is a founder of Silver Press, the feminist publisher, and Spiral House, a new imprint for art, poetry and ways of knowing; Ignota, the creative publishing and curatorial house that closed in 2024; New Suns literary festival at the Barbican Centre; and Standard Deviation.

Marilyn Strathern is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, and Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge University. Her ethnographic forays are divided between Papua New Guinea and Britain. Apart from gender relations and kinship, she has written on reproductive technologies; intellectual and cultural property, and ‘critique of good practice’, an umbrella rubric for reflections on audit and accountability. It was in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea in 1976 that a fellow anthropologist introduced her to LeGuin. Her own most experimental publication is the essay, Partial Connections (Rowman & Littlefield, 1991). A recent(ish) work is simply called Relations (Duke University Press, 2020).

Please get in touch to let us know of any access requirements that you might have and how we can best accommodate these. If you are unable to attend physically but would like to participate in the event remotely please email publicprogramme@aaschool.ac.uk.

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