Sofia Samatar

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Sofia Samatar (2017)

Sofia Samatar (born October 24, 1971 in Indiana ) is an American writer. Her best-known book is the fantasy novel A Stranger in Olondria .

Life

Samatar's father is the Somali historian Said Sheikh Samatar , and her mother comes from a Mennonite family in North Dakota . She attended a Mennonite high school , then studied at the also Mennonite Goshen College ( Bachelor 1994) in Indiana and in 1997 earned a master's degree in African languages ​​and literature from the University of Wisconsin – Madison . After graduating, she married the writer Keith Miller and worked as an English teacher for three years in what is now South Sudan and then for nine years in Egypt . After returning to the USA, she completed her PhD in Arabic literature at the University of Wisconsin in 2013 with a dissertation on the Sudanese poet At-Tayyib Salih . Since then she has been an Assistant Professor at California State University, Channel Islands in Camarillo .

In 2012 Samatar's first novel, A Stranger in Olondria , was published by the independent SF publisher Small Beer Press . The novel has won several awards, including the World Fantasy and British Fantasy Awards , and was nominated for the Nebula Award . He also brought Samatar the 2014 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer.

The novel is about Jevick, the son of a pepper merchant, and Olondria, the land of his longing, where books are everyday objects. After the death of his father, he has the chance to get to know the country for himself on the annual trade trip to Olondria. When he reaches his goal, he is the victim of a visitation, the ghost of a girl persecutes and harasses him, which is why he seeks help from the priests of Olondria, which in turn entangles him in the political disputes of Olondria and the hidden intrigues of two powerful cults. Central themes are language and narration, written and spoken, the representation of reality in language and the encounter with the foreign culture of Olondria, which Jevick was only known from books and which is more complex and different in personal experience. Samatar had started writing the novel while working in South Sudan. Here she also depicts her situation at the time, in which she had studied Swahili and Arabic , but was now confronted with the lively culture of Sudan and Egypt.

Starting with The Nazir, Samatar has published over two dozen short stories since 2012, published in Strange Horizons , Clarkesworld and Apex , among others , of which the Tender (2017) collection contains a selection. The story Selkie Stories Are for Losers was in 2014 for the Hugo nominated and the Nebula Award. Her stories often move in the border areas of realism , fantasy and science fiction . Samatar's preference for crossing genre boundaries is also expressed in the fact that she was a co-editor of non-fiction and poetry in Delia Sherman's interstitial fiction magazine Interfictions .

Together with her brother, the artist Del Samatar, she published the volume Monster Portraits in 2018 , a collection of portraits of fantastic monsters, consisting of graphics and accompanying prose poems or poetic sketches with accompanying illustrations.

Awards

bibliography

Novels
  • A Stranger in Olondria (2012)
  • The Winged Histories (2016)
Collections
  • Tender (2017)
  • Monster Portraits (2018, with Del Samatar)
Short stories
  • The Nazir (2012)
  • A Brief History of Nonduality Studies (2012)
  • Honey Bear (2012)
  • Selkie Stories Are for Losers (2013)
  • Dawn and the Maiden (2013)
  • I Stole the DC's Eyeglass (2013)
  • Bess, the Landlord's Daughter, Goes for Drinks with the Green Girl (2013)
  • Olimpia's Ghost (2013)
  • Ogres of East Africa (2014)
  • How to Get Back to the Forest (2014)
  • A Girl Who Comes Out of a Chamber at Regular Intervals (2014)
  • Walkdog (2014)
  • Those (2015)
  • Request for an Extension on the Clarity (2015)
  • Tender (2015)
  • The Closest Thing to Animals (2015)
  • How I Met the Ghoul (2015)
  • Meet Me in Iram (2015)
  • His Hollow (2016)
  • Cities of Emerald, Deserts of Gold (2016)
  • The Red Thread (2016)
  • The Tale of Mahliya and Mauhub and the White-Footed Gazelle (2016)
  • An Account of the Land of Witches (2017)
  • Fallow (2017)
  • Universal Geography (2018)
  • Hard Mary (2018)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Stranger Scripts . Interview in Locus # 629 (Vol. 70, No. 6, June 2013, excerpts online , accessed December 9, 2018).
  2. ↑ Ahmed I. Samatar: Interview with Professor Said Sheikh Samatar at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Washington, DC In: Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies. Vol. 6, Article 5 (2008), p. 5, accessed on December 9, 2018.
  3. ^ A b c Nic Clarke: Ways of Knowing: An interview with Sofia Samatar . In: Strange Horizons , July 24, 2013, accessed December 10, 2018.
  4. ↑ Sofia Samatar - CSUCI faculty profiles , accessed on 9 December 2018th
  5. ↑ Interfictions Online - Masthead , accessed December 10, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Samatar, Sofia
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 24, 1971
PLACE OF BIRTH Indiana , USA