Margrét Helgadóttir | |
|---|---|
 Margret Helgadottir | |
| Born | Ingibjörg Margrét Helgadóttir November 10, 1971 Yirgalem, Ethiopia |
| Occupation | Short-story writer, author, editor, anthologist |
| Nationality | Norwegian |
| Education | Cand.polit. |
| Genre | Science fiction Speculative fiction Horror fiction |
| Website | |
| margrethelgadottir | |
Margret Helgadottir is Norwegian-Icelandic, a four times British Fantasy Award-nominated author and anthology editor, and winner of the Starburst's Brave New Words Award.
Helgadóttir was born in Ethiopia to Norwegian and Icelandic parents. [1] She has written about her background as Missionary kid and crosscultural child, and how it has influenced her writing, and said: “... the scars and blessings it has given me to be a child who moved lots between cultures whilst trying to develop my own identity. ... Many of my characters struggle with grief and a feeling of being lost, like in The Stars Seem So Far Away.” [2]
She holds a Cand.polit. degree in Pedagogy from the University of Oslo. She has worked as teacher, and in several Norwegian ministries and directorates in Oslo, and in the Nordic Council of Ministers in Copenhagen, Denmark. [3]
Helgadóttir is a charter member of the African Speculative FictionSociety. [4]
She lives in Oslo, and has lived in Ethiopia, Senegal, Denmark and Norway. [5]
Helgadóttir started writing fiction in English (her native language is Norwegian) in 2012, [2] when she was one of the winners [6] of a writing competition held by UK-based Fox Spirit Books. Her stories have since then appeared in several anthologies and magazines, such as Luna Station Quarterly, Gone Lawn Journal, The Girl at the End of the World, and Sunspot Jungle - The Ever Expanding Universe of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her prose is called lyrical and haunting. [7] [8]
Helgadóttir's debut book, The Stars Seem So Far Away, from 2015, was nominated for British Fantasy Awards in 2016, [9] and is an apocalyptic road tale set in a far-future Arctic world, told through linked tales of five survivors. [10] The book can be seen as a hybrid of a novel and a collection. [2] Mark Bould wrote: "This is why slightly unusual the structure works so well. The characters – and the novel – move from profound disconnection to reconnection." [11] Interzone (magazine) said: "Whether these are stories, chapters, fragments or something else, this book is still stunningly original”, and: “imagine J.G. Ballard rewrote The Odyssey”, [12] while E.P. Beaumont wrote: “The stripped-down language and huge landscapes link this short novel to the world of epic poetry and saga." [13]
Helgadóttir is also an anthology editor, her work including the seven volumes in the anthology series The Fox Spirit Books of Monsters, where she invited authors and artists to write stories based on their own folklore and culture. [14] The idea of the series is to feature creatures and monsters from around the world that have not received much spotlight in the western culture. [15] The Future Fire says: "... this series is a needed intervention into Anglo-American-centric monster stories", [16] while Bookshy writes: “The thing is growing up in Nigeria, European and American monsters never really terrified me because they were far away. ... So African Monsters terrified me in a way that a horror story hasn't in a long while because I could really relate to the monsters”. [17]
The series contain stories by authors such as Cory Doctorow, Darcie Little Badger, Liliana Colanzi, Lewis Shiner, Nnedi Okorafor, Tade Thompson, Ken Liu, Xia Jia, Aliette de Bodard, Usman T. Malik, Tina Makereti, and Maria Galina. Three of the volumes have been nominated for British Fantasy Awards, [18] [19] [20] and Helgadóttir was awarded Starburst (magazine)'s inaugural Brave New Words Award for her editor work on Pacific Monsters. [21] The award is made to an “individual who produces break-out literature that is New and Bold.” [22]
Short stories:
Books:
Non fiction:
Shortlists (finalist):
Awards:
Stories in anthologies Helgadóttir has edited have also been shortlisted to several awards, including the Caine Prize for African Writing (2017: Chikodili Emelumadu for “Bush Baby” in African Monsters), [39] [40] Aurealis Award (2017: Michael Grey for "Grind" in Pacific Monsters), [41] Australian Shadows Award (2017: Rue Karney for "The Hand Walker" in Pacific Monsters), [42] and Sir Julius Vogel Awards (2018: AJ Fitwater for "From the Womb of the Land, Our Bones Entwined" in Pacific Monsters). [43]
Nalo Hopkinson is a Jamaican-born Canadian speculative fiction writer and editor. Her novels – Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Midnight Robber (2000), The Salt Roads (2003), The New Moon's Arms (2007) – and short stories such as those in her collection Skin Folk (2001) often draw on Caribbean history and language, and its traditions of oral and written storytelling.
Ellen Datlow is an American science fiction, fantasy, and horror editor and anthologist. She is a winner of the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award.
Nnedimma Nkemdili "Nnedi" Okorafor is a Nigerian American writer of science fiction and fantasy for both children and adults. She is best known for her Binti Series and her novels Who Fears Death, Zahrah the Windseeker, Akata Witch, Akata Warrior, Lagoon and Remote Control. She has also written for comics and film.
Martha Wells is an American writer of speculative fiction. She has published a number of fantasy novels, young adult novels, media tie-ins, short stories, and nonfiction essays on fantasy and science fiction subjects. Her novels have been translated into twelve languages. Wells has won four Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards and three Locus Awards for her science fiction series The Murderbot Diaries. She is also known for her fantasy series Ile-Rien and The Books of the Raksura. Wells is praised for the complex, realistically detailed societies she creates; this is often credited to her academic background in anthropology.
Victor LaValle is an American author. He is the author of a short-story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus, and five novels, The Ecstatic,Big Machine,The Devil in Silver,The Changeling, and Lone Women. His fantasy-horror novella The Ballad of Black Tom won the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for best novella. LaValle writes fiction primarily, though he has also written essays and book reviews for GQ, Essence Magazine, The Fader, and The Washington Post, among other publications.
Dennis William Etchison was an American writer and editor of fantasy and horror fiction. Etchison referred to his own work as "rather dark, depressing, almost pathologically inward fiction about the individual in relation to the world". Stephen King has called Dennis Etchison "one hell of a fiction writer" and he has been called "the most original living horror writer in America".
Nisi Shawl is an African-American writer, editor, and journalist. They are best known as an author of science fiction and fantasy short stories who writes and teaches about how fantastic fiction might reflect real-world diversity of gender, sexual orientation, race, colonialism, physical ability, age, and other sociocultural factors.
Catriona (Cat) Sparks is an Australian science fiction writer, editor and publisher.
Daniel Andrew Wells is an American horror and science fiction author. Wells's first published novel, I Am Not a Serial Killer, was adapted into a movie in 2016.
Kameron Hurley is an American science fiction and fantasy writer.
Chris Kelso is a British Fantasy writer, illustrator, and anthologist from Scotland.
Sofia Samatar is an American scholar, novelist and educator from Indiana.
Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani speculative fiction author. His short fiction has been published in magazines and books such as The Apex Book of World SF, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, Black Static, and in a number of "year's best" anthologies. He is the first Pakistani to win the Bram Stoker Award for Short Fiction (2014) and has won the British Fantasy Award (2016). He has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award (2016), nominated again for the Stoker Award (2018), has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award, and has been nominated for multiple Locus Awards.
Nuzo Onoh is a Nigerian-British writer. She grew up the third of eight children of the late Chief Mrs Caroline Onoh, a former headteacher. Her father was Chief Dr. C.C Onoh, the wealthy landowner, lawyer, politician, and former governor of Anambra State. She experienced the Biafran war with Nigeria (1967–70) as a child refugee within numerous Biafran villages and towns and at the age of 13, she was the victim of an attempted "exorcism" by a local pastor. Due to this experience, she advocates for greater awareness of ritual child abuse in African communities. On 17 June 2023, Nuzo Onoh became a recipient of the 2022 Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award. The award is conferred on "an individual whose work has substantially influenced the horror genre", and "is an acknowledgment of superior achievement in an entire career." Nuzo is the first African and Black-British to win this award.
Neon Yang, formerly JY Yang, is a Singaporean writer of English-language speculative fiction best known for the Tensorate series of novellas published by Tor.com, which have been finalists for the Hugo Award, Locus Award, Nebula Award, World Fantasy Award, Lambda Literary Award, British Fantasy Award, and Kitschie Award. The first novella in the series, The Black Tides of Heaven, was named one of the "100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time" by Time magazine. Their debut novel, The Genesis of Misery, the first book in The Nullvoid Chronicles, was published in 2022 by Tor Books, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, received a nomination for the 2022 Goodreads Choice Award for Science Fiction, and was a Finalist for the 2023 Locus Award for Best First Novel and 2023 Compton Crook Award.
Jeannette Ng is a British fantasy writer best known for her 2017 novel Under the Pendulum Sun, for which she won the Sydney J Bounds Award for Best Newcomer at the 2018 British Fantasy Awards. For that work, she was also the winner of the 2019 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, which, largely due to her acceptance speech, was shortly renamed thereafter to the Astounding Award for Best New Writer. In 2020, she won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work for that acceptance speech.
Bogi Takács is a Hungarian poet, writer, psycholinguist, editor, and translator. Takács is an intersex, agender, trans, Jewish writer who has written Torah-inspired Jewish-themed work, and uses e/em/eir/emself or they/them pronouns.
Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is a Nigerian speculative fiction writer, editor and publisher who is the first African-born Black author to win a Nebula Award. He's also received a World Fantasy Award, British Fantasy Award, Otherwise Award, and two Nommo Awards along with being a multi-time finalist for a number of other honors including the Hugo Award.
Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction From Africa and the African Diaspora is a 2020 speculative fiction anthology edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Zelda Knight. It contains thirteen works of short fiction, and a foreword by Tananarive Due. It was first published by Aurelia Leo in 2020.
Cherae Clark, also known under the pen name C. L. Clark, is an American author and editor of speculative fiction, a personal trainer, and an English teacher. She graduated from Indiana University's creative writing MFA and was a 2012 Lambda Literary Fellow. Their debut novel, The Unbroken, first book of the Magic of the Lost trilogy, was published by Orbit Books in 2021 and received critical acclaim, including starred reviews at Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. The Unbroken was a Finalist for the 2021 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the 2022 Robert Holdstock Award for Best Fantasy Novel from the British Fantasy Awards, the 2022 Ignyte Award for Best Novel - Adult, and the 2022 Locus Award for Best First Novel. Her work has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies,FIYAH Literary Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, Glitter + Ashes: Queer Tales of a World That Wouldn't Die, PodCastle, Tor.com, Uncanny, and The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021). Clark edited, with series editor Charles Payseur, We're Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction of 2020, which won the 2022 Ignyte Award for Best Anthology/Collected Work and the 2022 Locus Award for Best Anthology.
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