Premee Mohamed

Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. Her fiction has won the Nebula Award, Locus Award, World Fantasy Award, and multiple Aurora Awards. She also works as the social media manager and associate editor for Escape Pod.

Early life and education

Premee Mohamed was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. She earned a BSc in molecular genetics from the University of Alberta in 2002. She later went back and earned a second BSc degree in environmental science.

Career

Her first published novel, Beneath the Rising (2020), was written between 2000 and 2002 and was not her first manuscript but the first submitted for publication. She submitted the novel in 2016 after her short story "The Adventurer’s Wife" was accepted for an anthology. Since then, Mohamed's short stories have appeared in multiple magazines and anthologies. Beneath the Rising was a finalist for the Aurora Award, British Fantasy Award, Locus Award, and Crawford Award. It is the first in a trilogy.

Her short story "Willing" was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2017.

Mohamed's 2021 novella, The Annual Migration of Clouds, won the 2022 Aurora Award for Best Novelette/Novella. It was also a finalist for the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction and the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize. The book is the first in a trilogy about a young woman named Reid living in "a post-climate disaster Alberta." The third book in the series, The First Thousand Trees, was a 2025 Canadian Independent Booksellers AssociationBooksellers’ List selection.

Her novel The Siege of Burning Grass was shortlisted for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize and named one of the best science fiction books of 2024 by Esquire. Both The Siege of Burning Grass and The Butcher of the Forest won Aurora Awards in 2025.

Mohamed's 2025 collection One Message Remains, consisting four stories set in the same world, was published by Psychopomp. Tobias Carroll at Reactor characterized the collection as "very different from Mohamed’s bibliography thus far, but it shares with them a set of memorable characters and a reckoning with some of the grandest ethical questions out there." The book was a finalist for both the Aurora Award and Locus Award. The collection was shortlisted for the 2026 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.

Her 2026 novel Wickhills, about a secret agent in a magical city, was published by Tor Books on September 9, 2026, and received a starred review from Library Journal: "This gas-lamp urban fantasy combines an exciting adventure, a walk through dangerous, secret places, and one man’s crisis. The pace is relentless, the characters are unreliable at every turn, and the stakes are high with every step."