Sofia Samatar’s first novel, the epic fantasy A Stranger in Olondria (Small Beer, 2013) won the William L. Crawford Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and was included in Time magazine’s list of the 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time. She also received the 2014 Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Her second novel, The Winged Histories (Small Beer, 2016) completes the Olondria duology, and her short story collection, Tender (Small Beer, 2017) includes the Hugo and Nebula finalist “Selkie Stories Are for Losers” and two stories that were selected for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy (“Ogres of East Africa” and “How to Get Back to the Forest”). Monster Portraits (Rose Metal Press, 2018), Sofia Samatar’s collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar, was a finalist for the Italo Calvino Prize, and her memoir The White Mosque (Catapult, 2022) won the Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography and Memoir and was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award.
Sofia Samatar’s latest book is the novella The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain (Tor.com, 2024), a story of universities, carceral systems, and breath. Her nonfiction book Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in August 2024. She lives in Virginia and teaches African literature, Arabic literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University.