Helen Marshall
Helen Marshall is a critically acclaimed author, editor, and medievalist. After receiving a PhD from the prestigious Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, she spent two years completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford investigating literature written during the time of the Black Death. She is a Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing at the University of Queensland.Marshall’s creative writing aims to bring the past into conversation with the present. Her first collection of fiction, Hair Side, Flesh Side, which won the Sydney J Bounds Award in 2013, emerged from her work as a book historian. Rather than taking the long view of history, her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, negotiated very personal issues of legacy and tradition, creating myth-infused worlds where “love is as liable to cut as to cradle, childhood is a supernatural minefield, and death is ‘the slow undoing of beautiful things’” (Quill&Quire, starred review). It won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award in 2015, and was short-listed for the British Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award and the Aurora Award from the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association. Her third novel The Gold Leaf Executions was released in 2023.
Her debut novel The Migration (2019) argued for the need to remain hopeful, even in the worst circumstances. It was one of The Guardian’s top science fiction books of the year and was recently optioned by Clerkenwell Films. In 2020, it was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic and for both the Robert Holdstock Award for best fantasy novel and the August Derleth Award for best horror novel by the British Fantasy Society. It was the second time in the award’s history for a novel to short-listed for both, and the first time by a female writer.