These authors are in their first year of eligibility for the Astounding, meaning that their qualifying work was published in 2022. They’ll be eligible for the ballots at Chendgu Worldcon and Glasgow 2024.
Check the original post for a full(er) list of eligible authors, and the #astounding2023 tag for more of these spotlight posts. Short fiction tends to get less attention than debut novels (not that debut novels tend to get the promotion they deserve…) so I want to give an extra shout out to the short stuff.
Samuel Poots had a tiny story in Daily Science Fiction a couple years ago, but cleared the Astounding eligibility bar last year with “The Last and Fatal Light” in Neon Hemlock’s Opulent Syntax. He lives in Northern Ireland and has received an Arts Council award to support his novel-length work.
Gigi Ganguly published her debut novella in 2022, One Arm Shorter Than the Other. (Could you argue that a debut standalone novella is kinda like a debut novel and counter to the “short stuff” focus? Sure! But aside from being a fan of Atthis Arts, there are real style and craft differences between novels and novellas.) Ganguly’s earlier bibliography is filled with “odd little stories.”
Naseem Jamnia is a Persian Chicagoan living in Nevada, an MFA-holding neuroscientist, and Fellow of many things. Their novella, The Bruising of Qilwa, was released in 2022 and they have stories available and forthcoming in anthologies.
Ai Jiang is a prolific Chinese-Canadian author. As a sampler, you could begin by reading “Yǒngshí” (The Dark), “Come in, Children” (Hexagon), “What We Look for at the Night Market” (The Dread Machine), “In Water We Survive” (The Deadlands), and “Give Me English” (F&SF); dig through her website to find more. Later this year, look for a bunch of new short stories plus Linghun, I Am Ai, and the collection Smol Tales From Between Worlds.
A. P. Howell 
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