Aliette de Bodard

Aliette de Bodard (born November 10, 1982) is a French-American speculative fiction writer. She has received accolades including the British Fantasy Award, BSFA Award, Ignyte Award, Locus Award, and Nebula Award.

Writing

De Bodard published her first short story in 2006. In 2007, she was a winner of Writers of the Future, and in 2009 was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She has been published in Interzone, Hub Magazine, Black Static, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Asimov's, Realms of Fantasy, Apex Magazine, among others.

Her short story "The Shipmaker" won the 2010 British Science Fiction Award for Best Short Fiction. She won the 2012 Nebula Award for her short story "Immersion". The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction describes "Immersion" as "a deft intertwining of Avatar and Race in SF topoi" set in a space habitat. She also won the 2013 Nebula Award for "The Waiting Stars".

Her novel The House of Shattered Wings, set in a devastated Paris ruled by fallen angels, was published by Gollancz/Roc in August 2015. It won the BSFA Award for Best Novel of 2015. Her story "Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight" won the BSFA Award for Best Short Story of 2015, the first time a single author has ever won both fiction categories in the same year. Her Xuya Universe novella The Tea Master and the Detective won the 2018 Nebula Award for Best Novella.

Themes

Many of her stories are set in alternate history worlds where Aztec or pre-communist Vietnamese cultures are dominant. In a 2018 interview with L'épaule d'Orion, she stated that "taste is largely underutilised sensorily in science-fiction... future worlds in SF have a tendency to be sanitised." In a 2021 interview with Locus, she stated that she tried to write "parent-child relationships, and very often a mother-daughter relationship, because that's a thing you don't often see, aside from the controlling mother and the estranged mother. You don't even often see characters with dead mothers – the mothers tend to just fade out."

Personal life

De Bodard is of French and Vietnamese descent, born in the US, and grew up in Paris. French is her first language but she writes in English. A graduate of École Polytechnique, she works as a software engineer (as of 2024 in railway signalling), and is a member of the Written in Blood writers group. She is bisexual.