Kij Johnson is a well-respected novelist and short-story writer in the SF field. She is the winner of the 1994 Theodore Sturgeon Award for “Fox Magic”, the 2001 Crawford Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts for best new fantasist, the 2008 World Fantasy Award for “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss”, the 2009 Nebula Award for “Spar”, and the 2012 Nebula and Hugo awards for best novella for “The Man Who Bridged the Mist.” Her novel Fudoki (2003) was declared one of the best SF novels of 2003 by Publishers Weekly.

“As a reader and teacher, I long for freshness and originality. When we write genre literature, we sometimes restrict ourselves to plots driven by causality; we tidy away all our loose ends; we stay within guidelines shaped by the genre’s past or its readership. Literary and mainstream fiction has comparable (or narrower) guidelines. I love stories that manage to give me a clear narrative arc and yet surprise me. I guess a lot of what I write is about trying to surprise myself, which once in a while even works!”