Yes, Ursula K. LeGuin is still alive, and she certainly is a senior citizen now. A vocal one as well, for all that she states that she is too old and, how to say, spent to write yet another full-length novel. She has her own online blog now. And she waxes wroth indeed about publishing these days, with all the piracy and cheap copies about.

How could I overlook Robin Hobb's talking dragons! Her Five Duchies/FitzChivalry books are actually a multi-series phenomenon now, partly because she writes in such copious detail and fills out book after book, and series after series, with minutely observed world-building. In her books, the dragons are a nearly extinct vestige of a lost era of civilization. Their life cycle is especially involved. When an egg hatches, what comes out is not a dragon with legs, but a sea serpent -- a sentient, talking sea serpent. Eggs are intended to hatch together, so that the baby serpents can take to the ocean in a group and protect each other from predators. In order to proceed to the next developmental phase, the sea serpents must cross the seas to a land mass in search of a river delta. They proceed upriver, and it is in fresh water, for reasons I can't remember, that they face the next challenge. They spin for themselves a chrysalis or cocoon, sealing themselves inside; as the sea serpents are not small, these objects are large ones. It is in the privacy of the sealed chrysalis that a sea serpent metamorphoses, and emerges a dragon, who must then learn to survive as a predator. Yes, they certainly do talk, as well.