Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s The Big Book of Modern Fantasy, published in 2020 by Penguin Random House imprint Vintage, came out to a host of stellar reviews, was a finalist for a Locus Award, and won a World Fantasy Award. The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (2009, Vintage) received similar praise, including landing as a […]

Daniel Abraham’s first publication was “Mixing Rebecca” in 1996 (in Ann VanderMeer’s The Silver Web magazine). That same year he graduated from the University of New Mexico with a degree in biology. He worked for a decade in tech support but continued to write and sell stories. “Veritas” came out in Warren Lapine’s Absolute Magnitude […]

Independent scholar and writer Tarun K. Saint was born in Kenya and moved to Long Island, New York at the age of two. He started reading around age five or six. His father taught at Friends World College. They moved to Udaipur in Rajasthan, India in 1972, and Saint was deschooled until 1977, “with the […]

Diana M. Pho was born and raised in the suburbs of Massachusetts. She’s lived in NYC most of her adult life, but has also traveled extensively, including studying abroad in Moscow. Pho earned a double bachelor’s degree in English and Russian literature from Mount Holyoke College. She was mentored by Corinne Demas, Susan Daniels, and […]

Xueting Christine Ni was born in Guangzhou and spent most of her childhood there, but moved around a lot as a child, experiencing many regions and cultural dynamics in China. “I’ve lived in the old town with its very close alleyways, in meandering tenements, as well as in modern gated apartment complexes.” Her father worked […]

If you ever get to see Charlie Jane Anders host an event where she introduces people, you will be amazed by the way she sparkles; but you’ll also be astonished by her creative prowess. She comes up with highly entertaining, whimsical, and in-some-world probable introductions, individualized for each person she introduces. It’s kind of breathtaking […]

Cadwell Turnbull was born in Chevy Chase, MD and moved to his parents’ home island of St. Thomas when he was still an infant. He moved to Pittsburgh to attend La Roche University and earned a degree in professional writing. He returned to St. Thomas for a year and worked as a substitute teacher, and […]

Tobias Samuel Buckell was born in Grenada. He grew up there, as well as on the British Virgin Islands and the US Virgin Islands. He moved to Ohio as a teen, after Hurricane Marilyn destroyed the boat his family lived on. Buckell attended Clarion in 1999 and shortly after graduated from Bluffton University with an […]

Nina Allan was born in Whitechapel, London, and grew up in the Midlands and West Sussex. She studied Russian language and literature at the University of Reading and the University of Exeter and earned her master’s in literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. She has lived on the Isle of Bute for nearly five years […]

Getting started in genre in the 2000s, with sales at venues including Strange Horizons, Talebones, Subterranean, and Fantasy Magazine, Cat Rambo now has published more stories than many authors will ever write. Rambo was born in College Station, TX, and grew up in South Bend, IN, in a house that was full of books, with […]

Adrian Tchaikovsky, né Adrian Czajkowski, was born in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire. He studied zoology and psychology at the University of Reading. In the mid-nineties, he paid the bills working with the Legal Aid Board, and via on-the-job training became a legal executive, eventually specializing in debt collection, litigation, and landlord/tenant law. At eighteen, Tchaikovsky discovered […]

S. Qiouyi Lu was born and grew up in the San Gabriel Valley. Æ went to college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, majoring in linguistics with a minor in Chinese. Æ did a few years of grad school, studying linguistics at Ohio State University, but ultimately returned to the San Gabriel […]

Tommy Arnold’s memorable illustrations grace Fran Wilde’s Updraft books, the Subterranean Press edition of Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries, C. L. Clark’s The Unbroken, Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, and many more. Among other accolades, he was a Jack Gaughan Award winner in 2016, has been a Chesley Award nominee every […]

Sheree Renée Thomas was born in Memphis, TN. The eldest child of an air force vet, she grew up on various military bases. She eventually moved to New York, where she lived for twenty years before returning to live in Memphis. She worked at genre bookstore Forbidden Planet, as well as working full-time in publishing […]

Born in Malaysia, Cassandra Khaw grew up watching horror movies with their parents, from John Carpenter’s The Thing to A Nightmare on Elm Street to Critters. When they got older, they got into Asian horror movies, such as Shutter and The Eye. Nonetheless, long before landing their first fiction sales, they were a tech and […]

Alyssa Winans grew up near Chicago. She studied in Japan for a year in high school, and her education had a strong emphasis on math and science. Regardless, she moved to Rhode Island for college, planning to study graphic design. “Luckily, everyone I met looked at my work and quickly directed me towards illustration.” Winans […]

Before Kelly Robson was a celebrated science fiction writer, she competed in rodeos, and was even a rodeo princess. “I like to say that being a rodeo princess is like having all the glamour and none of the responsibility. Also to be clear, this isn’t a beauty contest—it’s a riding contest.” Robson was born in […]

New Zealand author Octavia Cade had always planned to be a scientist when she grew up. “But as much as I love science, scientific writing sucked all my enthusiasm out. It’s the worst. It’s boring and inaccessible and scientists have no right to whine about people misunderstanding science when they have done everything they can […]

Harry Turtledove first published as Eric Iverson, after being told that people would think “Turtledove” wasn’t his real name. Sword and sorcery adventure novels Wereblood and Werenight came out in 1979 with Belmont Tower. Del Rey/Ballantine published The Misplaced Legion in 1987 (wherein Romans are transported to another universe), beginning the Videssos cycle in the […]

Bo-Young Kim is one of the luminaries of Korean-language science fiction. After studying psychology in university and a stint as a scenario/script writer for a computer games company, she debuted as an SF author to great effect: her first published work, “The Experience of Touch,” won the best novella award in the inaugural 2002 round […]

Elly Bangs was born in Seattle and lived there nearly her whole life. She earned a BA in creative writing from The Evergreen State College, roughly sixty miles away. She’s primarily worked in small nonprofit organizations, “usually in a role that combines doing all their paperwork with building their websites and databases. Right now I’m […]

Becky Chambers grew up outside Los Angeles “in a family heavily involved in space science”—her father worked in aerospace engineering, her mother worked as an astrobiology educator. Her mother loved genre fiction, so Chambers was reading and watching SFF shows before she’d started school. Despite the prevalence of the sciences in her family, she moved […]

As a self-avowed Star Trek nerd, it is perhaps fitting that Karen Osborne’s earliest attempts at selling fiction were in the Star Trek franchise: “As a teen, I once wrote a Star Trek: Voyager spec script with a friend over CompuServe, which became my first real rejection letter. It’s framed.” Osborne’s first SFF sales of […]

Born in Pondicherry, India, S.B. Divya moved to the US when she was five. She graduated high school in Minnesota, then did her undergrad at Caltech. Divya dabbled in one creative writing class during her sophomore year, but ultimately went for her computational neuroscience degree. She later earned a master’s in signal processing from UC […]

If you Google “author with most Hugo awards” the answer Google pushes on you is that Robert A. Heinlein won four Hugo awards in his lifetime for Best Novel. Not counting retroactive awards, his last win was in 1967. If you squint you will see another result: Lois McMaster Bujold, four wins for Best Novel […]

In 2011 Clarkesworld published E. Lily Yu's short story “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees,” which was a finalist for the Dell Award. The genre community also took notice: the story earned her nominations for a Million Writers Award, a Hugo Award, a Nebula Award, a World Fantasy Award, and a Locus Award. In […]

When Stina Leicht was small, she wanted to grow up to be like Vincent Price—or so her website says. Instead, she grew up to be a writer who has impressed fans and critics alike. Stina Leicht (“Pronounced ‘Steena.’ Think of it as Tina with an extra-added S. My last name is pronounced ‘Lite,’ like the […]

Long before winning a Hugo and a Rhysling, Tim Pratt worked as an advertising copywriter (briefly), and as a tech writer and office manager for a disability advocacy company. In 2001 he moved to Oakland, CA and landed a job as editorial assistant at Locus Magazine. Born in Goldsboro, NC, as a child Pratt traveled […]

Many only know him by the shortened name on the spine: Flesk, next to the logo resembling leaves or fire—at least to me. But John Fleskes has been putting out high quality art books for nearly twenty years. Flesk Publications showcases fantastic art by a range of artists, many of them with an array of […]

Rebecca Kuang is one of those rare individuals who hit a home run right out of the gate. She wrote a book for herself as an experiment and it became a big hit. Kuang is a Marshall Scholar and a Chinese-English translator. She earned an MPhil in Chinese studies from Cambridge and an MSc in […]