A Wizard Of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel by Ursula K Le Guin, adapted by Fred Fordham

That has got to win the prize for unwieldiest title going.

But yes, I came to this graphic novel adaptation of Ursula K Le Guin’s classic because it’s been nominated for the 2026 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story. Fred Fordham has done an incredible job here and I’m grateful that this book was nominated, even if I would never have picked it up of my own accord because, speak it softly, I never actually cared for the original.

I wish I could appreciate that prose novel more but, reading it as a teenager, I was put off not only by Ged being deeply annoying but by the weird, almost condescending attitude towards the few women in it. The only female mages in the book are either simple (derogatory) or evil (ditto, obvs,) and all the women are defined by their relationship with men. I had no idea why I was supposed to care about Ged, much less identify with his dumb ass. This was especially baffling because Ms Le Guin was touted to me as a feminist and a humanist, and her works were supposed to be an antidote to the patriarchal bent of most Western fantasy fiction of the time. This book felt, to me, no different in narrative tone from any of the books it purported not to be like, with the only marginally interesting dissimilarity being Ged’s copper-colored skin that, while a laudable attempt at diversity, did not feel like actual representation (especially if you’ve ever read any mid-century popular British literature and knew that white authors often described other white people with tans as being “brown as a berry.”)

Mr Fordham’s work here, perhaps in tandem with my own maturity as a reader and person, has done a lot to help me feel a little more warmly to the story now than when I first encountered it. The Ged in this graphic adaptation is more obviously a dipshit, so his journey towards becoming a better person feels more earned. The juxtaposition between Ms Le Guin’s words and Mr Fordham’s expressive panels do a really good job of skewering the hero-building around Ged, making this graphic novel adaptation feel like much less of a tedious read than the original was. Ged is still annoying but at least the climax of his battle against the Shadow here felt revelatory, a much more welcome feeling than the “oh thank fuck, this book has got to be ending soon” moment I experienced when first reading the original (tho probably with less profanity. I was a good kid, lol.)

And in perfect honesty, I didn’t find the “you are your own worst enemy” message of the book particularly enlightening when I read it as a youngster: I already understood culturally the importance of self-discipline, humility and balance in becoming a whole and hopefully good person. I can see how others might find it life altering if they’d never encountered those concepts presented as narrative end goals before, tho this also underscored to me how very white-fantasy-novel-coded this book actually was, that this was considered groundbreaking material instead of a natural part of becoming a responsible person.

Whether or not you enjoy the source material, however, I can wholly recommend this adaptation. Fans will delight in how Mr Fordham illustrates the novel, while non-fans will appreciate the amount of work he’s put in to substituting his wonderful watercolors for Ms Le Guin’s prose choices. He brings the original to life in a way that makes it better for all readers, much like Manu Larcenet did for Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I greatly enjoyed what he did here — and may I say again that the art is breathtakingly brilliant — and while I don’t know yet how highly I rank this book in my Hugos voting slate, I do know that I hope it gains a lot of well-deserved acclaim.

A Wizard Of Earthsea: A Graphic Novel by Ursula K Le Guin, adapted by Fred Fordham was published March 11 2025 by Clarion Books and is available from all good booksellers, including