Here are 7 Author Shoutouts. Find your favorite author or discover an author whose work you’ve not yet read.
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In This Author Shoutouts
Nicola Griffith
An Author Shoutout to Nicola Griffith, an acclaimed British-American novelist, essayist, and scholar celebrated for her lyrical prose, rigorous world-building, and transformative queer perspectives across historical fiction, science fiction, and noir.
Griffith gained immediate acclaim with her debut science fiction novel, Ammonite (1992), which won the James Tiptree Jr. (now Otherwise) Award and a Lambda Literary Award for its exploration of an all-female planet. She followed with the Nebula Award-winning cyberpunk thriller Slow River (1995). In historical fiction, Griffith achieved widespread critical renown through the Hild Sequence: Hild (2013) and Menewood (2023), that reimagine the vivid, seventh-century life of Saint Hilda of Whitby using the dense cognitive estrangement techniques of speculative fiction. Her Arthurian novella, Spear (2022), earned the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Ray Bradbury Prize) for subverting Percival’s quest into a luminous queer tale.
Beyond her fiction, Griffith has been an influential cultural force. A former women’s self-defense teacher and wheelchair boxer diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1993, she co-founded #CripLit to mentor disabled authors and conducted groundbreaking data studies exposing gender bias across major literary prizes. In recognition of her expansive contributions to speculative literature, she was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame and named a Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master. Griffith lives in Seattle with her wife, novelist Kelley Eskridge.
Tamsyn Muir
An Author Shoutout to Tamsyn Muir, a New Zealand novelist and short-story writer celebrated for revolutionizing contemporary science fantasy with her audacity, dark humor, and gothic sensibilities. She achieved widespread acclaim by masterfully colliding high-concept space opera with decaying Catholic ritual, bone magic, and internet-age irreverence.
Muir exploded onto the global literary scene with her blockbuster debut novel, Gideon the Ninth (2019), the inaugural volume of The Locked Tomb series. Famous for its promotional tagline, “Lesbian necromancers in space,” the novel won the Locus Award for Best First Novel and the Crawford Award, earning Hugo and Nebula nominations. She followed with Harrow the Ninth (2020), an audacious, second-person psychological puzzle box that divided and dazzled critics, and Nona the Ninth (2022), which originated as an unexpected intermediate tale when the planned final volume outgrew its initial scope. She is also the author of the novella Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (2020).
Muir spent her youth in Howick, Auckland, before growing up in the isolated, subantarctic environment of Invercargill, an icy backdrop that deeply colored her barren fictional landscapes. An alumna of the prestigious Clarion Writers’ Workshop (2010), she worked as a trained secondary-school English teacher before writing full-time. Known for infusing Shakespearean tragedy with viral memes and pulp gothic imagery, Muir has garnered a fiercely devoted cult following, permanently reshaping queer speculative fiction.
Samantha Shannon
An Author Shoutout to Samantha Shannon who is an acclaimed British author celebrated for revitalizing high fantasy and dystopian fiction through immersive world-building, intricate political intrigue, and queer, feminist reinterpretations of classic myth.
Shannon burst into the literary spotlight at just twenty-one with The Bone Season (2013), the launch of an ambitious seven-book dystopian fantasy sequence. Set in a scio-surveillance 2059 London dominated by the autocratic republic Scion, the series follows dreamwalker Paige Mahoney through a dangerous underground of clairvoyance and extraterrestrial overseers. In 2019, Shannon cemented her global reputation with The Priory of the Orange Tree, a sweeping 800-page high fantasy that achieved international bestseller status. Subverting the chivalric legend of Saint George and the Dragon, the epic novel centers an alliance of powerful queens, dragon riders, and mages across divided continents. She expanded this rich universe with the celebrated prequel novel, A Day of Fallen Night (2023).
Born and raised in West London, Shannon studied English Language and Literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she balanced university tutorials with drafting her breakthrough manuscripts. Her work is deeply colored by her academic immersion in Old and Middle English, folklore, and theological history. Often commended for replacing Eurocentric, male-dominated epic fantasy tropes with matriarchal dynasties and nuanced LGBTQ+ romances, Shannon stands among the foremost creators defining the modern epic fantasy landscape.
Aliette de Bodard
An Author Shoutout to Aliette de Bodard who is an acclaimed French-American author celebrated for weaving Vietnamese mythology, Mesoamerican history, and non-Western family structures into richly layered speculative fiction. Writing in English as a non-native speaker, she has become one of the most distinctive voices redefining contemporary space opera and fantasy.
De Bodard gained widespread critical acclaim for her Universe of Xuya, an alternate-history space opera setting where Asian powers crossed the Americas first and launched space travel fueled by sentient starships functioning as ancestral family members. Works in this cycle, including the novella The Tea Master and the Detective (2018), earned the Nebula Award and the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Award. She is equally celebrated for standalone fantasies like In the Vanishers’ Palace (2018), a queer, post-apocalyptic retelling of Beauty and the Beast steeped in Vietnamese lore, and Fireheart Tiger (2021), a diplomatic fantasy inspired by pre-colonial Annam. Her darker epic fantasies include the Aztec noir series Obsidian and Blood and the Paris-set fallen-angel saga Dominion of the Fallen.
Born in the United States and raised in Paris, de Bodard balances her prolific literary career with a full-time profession as a systems engineer specializing in computer vision. A graduate of École Polytechnique, she deliberately incorporates scientific precision into her magic systems. A multi-time winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards, de Bodard is celebrated for centering interpersonal communal ethics, culinary tradition, and queer romance over conventional imperial conquest.
Nghi Vo
An Author Shoutout to Nghi Vo who is an acclaimed American author celebrated for her spare, luminous prose, intricate narrative structures, and subversive reimagining of folklore, imperialism, and queer desire.
Vo captured international acclaim with her brilliant debut novella, The Empress of Salt and Fortune (2020), launching the celebrated Singing Hills Cycle. Following the nonbinary cleric Chih and their memory-recording bird, the story reveals a fallen empire’s history through the subtle domestic artifacts left by marginalized women. The novella won both the Hugo Award and the Crawford Award, establishing a cycle that continued with titles like When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain and Mammoths at the Gates. In 2021, Vo released her debut novel, The Chosen and the Beautiful, a queer, supernatural reimagining of The Great Gatsby centering Jordan Baker as a Vietnamese adoptee navigating 1920s demonic high society. She followed with Siren Queen (2022), a dark urban fantasy exposing the monstrous, blood-pact realities of Golden Age Hollywood through a queer Chinese-American starlet.
Born in Peoria, Illinois, and based on the shores of Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Vo spent years publishing short fiction in venues like Strange Horizons and Uncanny Magazine before her breakout. Deeply invested in who controls historical memory, Vo frequently deconstructs grand colonial narratives into intimate, domestic rebellions. Her ability to entwine mythic grandeur with queer intimacy has cemented her as one of modern speculative fiction’s most compelling stylists.
A. K. Larkwood
An Author Shoutout to A. K. Larkwood, a British fantasy author celebrated for crafting inventive, portal-hopping epic fantasies that blend sprawling world-building, razor-sharp dialogue, and unapologetically queer characters.
Larkwood made an impressive literary entrance with her debut novel, The Unspoken Name (2020), the inaugural volume of The Serpent Gates duology. The novel follows Csorwe, an orc-like priestess raised to be sacrificed to a death god, who is rescued moments before execution by a rogue sorcerer and trained as his bodyguard, assassin, and spy across a multiversal labyrinth of dying worlds. The book was a finalist for the Locus Award for Best First Novel and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Larkwood concluded the duology with The Thousand Eyes (2022), which leaps forward two decades to confront the resurging horrors of ancient, cosmic gods. She expanded her scope with works like The Splintered Sun, delving into high-stakes adventure steeped in mythic reimagining.
Born in the south of England, Larkwood studied English at St John’s College, Cambridge, where she honed a passion for classical folklore, myth, and medieval narrative structure. Before dedicating herself to fiction, she worked in higher education administration and media. Renowned for subverting high fantasy tropes, pairing deadpan humor and heist-like pacing with visceral explorations of faith, chosen family, and liberation from toxic mentors, Larkwood stands as an exhilarating voice in modern queer speculative fiction.
Kalynn Bayron
An Author Shoutout to Kalynn Bayron, a bestselling American author and classically trained vocalist celebrated for revitalizing young adult fantasy through subversive fairy-tale retellings, gothic horror, and queer Black heroines.
Bayron rocketed to prominence with her breakout debut, Cinderella Is Dead (2020), an instant indie bestseller. Set two centuries after Cinderella’s death in a kingdom where young women are forced to attend an annual ball to be chosen by men, the novel follows Sophia, a queer Black teen who rebels against the regime alongside the fairy godmother’s descendant. She followed with the acclaimed Greek mythology-infused duology This Poison Heart (2021) and This Wicked Fate (2022), which draws on the myth of Medea and botanical magic to explore ancestral power. Her bibliography also features spine-chilling gothic thrillers such as The Vanquishers series and You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight (2023), an homage to classic teen slasher cinema with modern representation.
Born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska, Bayron grew up in a theater-loving household and spent nearly two decades performing as a professional musical theater actor and vocalist. Her theatrical background deeply influences her dramatic pacing, melodic dialogue, and dynamic character dynamics. Driven by a childhood desire to see Black girls central to sweeping fairy tales and spooky horror stories, Bayron continues to dismantle traditional tropes, establishing herself as an essential architect of contemporary, empowering speculative YA literature.
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