Nalo Hopkinson

Born on December 20, 1960, in Kingston, Jamaica, Nalo Hopkinson was the daughter of Freda Hopkinson, a library technician, and Abdur Rahman Slade Hopkinson, a Guyanese poet, playwright and actor who had studied alongside Derek Walcott at the University College of the West Indies and later acted in his Trinidad Theatre Workshop. The family moved between Jamaica, Trinidad and Guyana, with a spell in Connecticut while her father worked at Yale, and in 1977, when she was sixteen, they settled in Toronto, a city she would live in for more than thirty years and whose culture shock she has said she was never fully reconciled to. She took combined honors in Russian and French at York University and worked in libraries, in government arts research and as a grants officer at the Toronto Arts Council; she also holds a master's degree in writing popular fiction from Seton Hill University. A graduate of the Clarion workshop, she won the first Warner Aspect First Novel Contest with Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), in which a young woman in a Toronto core abandoned by the rich must come to terms with the Afro-Caribbean spirits her grandmother serves. It brought her the Locus Award for best first novel and the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Midnight Robber (2000), set on a planet settled by Caribbean colonists, was shortlisted for the Hugo; the stories of Skin Folk (2001) won the World Fantasy Award; and The Salt Roads (2003), The New Moon's Arms (2007), The Chaos (2012) and Sister Mine (2013) followed, alongside anthologies that gathered Caribbean and postcolonial speculative writing. Serious illness stopped her writing for years and left her homeless for two of them before the University of California, Riverside, hired her in 2011 to teach creative writing. In 2020 the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named her its 37th Grand Master, and in 2024 she published Blackheart Man, a novel fifteen years in the making. She now teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

At eleven or twelve, living in Kingston, Hopkinson would meet her mother after school at the big library where she worked and wait for her father to collect them. Her mother lent her the adult library card, and she found the science fiction shelves: Harlan Ellison first, then Samuel R. Delany, whose books at last spoke to her own world.