Octavia E. Butler

American · 1947 to 2006

Octavia Estelle Butler was born on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California, and raised largely by her mother, a housemaid, after her father died when she was a small child. A tall, shy, dyslexic only child, she found refuge in the Pasadena Central Library and began writing at ten, convinced she could do better than the science fiction B movies she watched on television. She earned an associate degree from Pasadena City College in 1968 and took writing courses at California State University, Los Angeles and UCLA, but the turning point came in 1970 at the Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop, where Harlan Ellison read her work, encouraged her, and helped place her first professional sale. She published her debut novel, Patternmaster, in 1976, the opening installment by publication order of a five book saga tracing a secret history of telepathic mutants; Kindred, her best known and most enduring novel, followed in 1979, using unexplained time travel to force a modern Black woman to confront the realities of antebellum slavery in her own family line. Over the next three decades Butler built a body of work, including the Xenogenesis trilogy and the Parable duology, that used science fiction to examine race, gender, power, and survival with unflinching moral seriousness. She won two Hugo Awards and two Nebula Awards, and in 1995 became the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the genius grant. In 2000 she received PEN American Center's Lifetime Achievement Award. Butler died on February 24, 2006, near her home in Lake Forest Park, Washington, after a fall, having spent her career opening a genre to voices and stories it had rarely made room for.