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Kij Johnson Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Kij Johnson

Kij Johnson

How to pronounce Kij Johnson: kidg JOHN-son

Kij Johnson Biography

Kij Johnson is a writer of short stories, novels and occasional other things. Her first sale was in 1987 to a small Minnesota magazine, Tales of the Unanticipated; since then she has sold more than fifty shorter works of fiction, as well as poems, nonfiction, and game materials. Her books include The Fox Woman (Tor, 1999); Fudoki (Tor, 2003, a finalist for the World Fantasy Award); the short story collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees (Small Beer Press, 2012, a finalist for the World Fantasy Award); The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe (Tor.com, 2016, winner of the World Fantasy Award); and The River Bank, a sequel to Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (Small Beer Press, 2017). There was also a Star Trek: The Next Generation book with bestseller Greg Cox, Dragon's Honor.

She is a three-time winner of the Nebula Award (2010, 2011, and 2012), and the World Fantasy Award (2009, 2017, and 2019), and a winner of the Hugo Award (2012), as well as winning the French Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire (2017), the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (1992); the Crawford Award (1999); and others. Her short stories include the award-winners "Fox Magic," "26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss," "Spar," "Ponies," "The Man Who Bridged the Mist," and "The Privilege of the Happy Ending." She's been translated into seventeen languages, and her work has been optioned for Hollywood twice.

In the past, she's had all the cool jobs: managing editor for Tor Books, Collections and Graphic Novels Editor for Dark Horse Comics, Continuity Director and Creative Director for various worlds at Wizards of the Coast/TSR, a subject matter expert for Microsoft, and a manager for user educations groups in several tech companies.

Currently, she lives in Lawrence Kansas with a cat, Jurat.

Kij Johnson's website

This bio was last updated on 10/15/2023. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.

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Interview

Kij Johnson on writing The Privilege of the Happy Ending, a collection of speculative and experimental stories that explore animal intelligences, gender, and the nature of stories.

Even now, every story I write is a conscious craft experiment, whatever else it is. It was very early in my fiction-writing life that I realized the kinds of stories I wanted to write would happen only if I forced myself past the margins of what I thought I already knew how to do, what I think of as my glibnesses. Even at the beginning I knew I loved vocabulary and lyricism, and I had intuitively developed an understanding of the uses for scenic and narrative writing. I also had a lot of experience with interiority and feelings because of all that bad poetry and journalling in high school and college. It seemed evident that if I worked hard on just those things, I could within a year or two write publishable — maybe even popular! — fiction that was atmospheric and full of feels. I also could tell that this would get boring for me — I had read plenty of author notes from writers, Arthur Conan Doyle, Fredric Brown and others, who grew to hate their comfortable niches.

As a child I had read obsessively in a lot of adult genres. I loved SF and fantasy, but I read a lot more mysteries and romances, and then there was horror, biographies, history, the classics, science. I didn 't always ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Kij Johnson at BookBrowse
The Privilege of the Happy Ending jacket Man Who Bridged the Mist jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Kij Johnson but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
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