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 […]

Well known for his award-winning trilogy about terraforming Mars with Red Mars in 1992, Green Mars in 1993, and Blue Mars in 1996, Kim Stanley Robinson’s first novel, The Wild Shore, came out in 1984. The Wild Shore was the first book for his Orange County trilogy as well as the first title in Ace […]

Before you ever heard of her, Rebecca Roanhorse was already on her way to glory. In 2018, she showed up in Pittsburgh for the Annual Nebula Awards Conference, nominated for her first publication: “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” (Apex Magazine 8/17). In front of a crowd of professional authors and publishers, almost all of […]

Born in Springfield, MA, Sheila Williams grew up in a family of five in western Massachusetts. Her mother had a master’s degree in microbiology; her father sparked her interest in genre fiction, reading Edgar Rice Burroughs to her. He had a membership to the Science Fiction Book Club, which delivered books every month. Once the […]

Scott H. Andrews has over a dozen electric guitars, half of which he built himself, including one he started building in 2007. But then he launched Beneath Ceaseless Skies in 2008. Beneath Ceaseless Skies (BCS) is a nonprofit, SFWA-qualifying online magazine dedicated to publishing “literary adventure fantasy: fantasy set in secondary-world or historical paranormal settings, […]

Writing fiction ranging from light fantasy to hard SF, Michael Swanwick has been earning award nominations since his 1980 novelettes landed on Locus lists and Nebula Awards ballots: “The Feast of Saint Janis” and “Ginungagap.” “Mummer Kiss” earned him his first win, an SF Chronicle Award in the Novelette category. Since then he’s received more […]

International bestselling author Lauren Beukes grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. She attended Roedean School in Johannesburg, earned an MA in creative writing from the University of Cape Town, and spent a decade as a freelance journalist working in South Africa and the US, covering electricity cable thieves, HIV+ beauty pageants, metro cops, and homeless […]

If you search the Tor.com site for Madeline Ashby, you will find this entry: “Hi. My name is Madeline Ashby, and I write the Cowboy Bebop rewatch posts.” Dig deeper and you’ll find an individual who is passionate about a great many things: anime, novels, film, and the future among them. Born in Panorama City, […]

Kate Elliott has far more books out than you probably know. Née Alis A. Rasmussen, she was born in Des Moines, IA, studied at University College of North Wales—Bangor and at Mills College in Oakland, CA, earning a BA in English. Her debut novel, The Labyrinth Gate, was published in 1988. In 1990, came the […]