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Aliette de Bodard
| Full Name: |
Aliette
de Bodard |
| Born: |
November 10, 1982
New York City, New York, USA |
| Occupation: |
Writer |
| Nationality: |
American French |
| Links: |
|
Biography
Aliette de Bodard was born in the US, but grew up in France (in the gorgeous city of Paris, to be precise). Although French is her mother tongue, her parents insisted early on that she learn to speak English.
She first discovered SF through the works of Isaac Asimov, and then moved to fantasy when she happened upon a copy of Ursula Le Guin's "The Earthsea Quartet", which today remains one of her favorite books in the genre. She decided to write when her family moved to London for a few years: she found a copy of Orson Scott Card's "How to Write Fantasy and Science Fiction", which first made her realise that she could try her hand at writing.
She is an alumni of Saint-Louis de Gonzague (Paris), Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle (London), and studied in Lycée Louis le Grand (Paris), in a classe préparatoire, a prep course for the competitive exams which would enable her to enter an engineering school. After two years of intensive classes, Aliette was admitted into Ecole Polytechnique, one of France's top engineering schools. During her class préparatoire, she started writing regularly, which enabled her to find a distraction from science. She completed two novels during her studies.
Halfway through Ecole Polytechnique, she started writing short stories instead of novels, in order to improve faster-and went on writing those after she graduated.
In June 2006, Aliette attended Orson Scott Card's Literary Bootcamp, which enabled her to sharpen her skills, as well as come back with a wealth of information about the craft and the business of writing.
Her writing took off after she won the Writers of the Future contest and got picked out of Interzone's slushpile by the inimitable Jetse de Vries; this marked the beginning of a growing number of sales, out of which several were made to semi-professional or professional markets. She was able to join SFWA as an Active Member in 2008, and became a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2009, narrowly losing to David Anthony Durham.
Her novel House of Shattered Wings, set in a post-Apocalyptic Paris and featuring Fallen angels, a washed-out alchemist and a former Vietnamese immortal with a grudge, is forthcoming from Gollancz (UK/Commonwealth) and Roc (US) in August 2015.
Aliette still lives in Paris with her husband, in a flat with more computers than warm bodies, and a bunch of Lovecraftian plants that are steadily taking over the living room.
Works in the WWEnd Database
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