2023 Astounding-eligible authors: roundup #5

These authors are in their second year of eligibility for the Astounding, meaning that their qualifying work was published in 2021. Their eligibility clocks run out after the Chendgu Worldcon ballot.

Check the original post for a full(er) list of eligible authors, and the #astounding2023 tag for more of these spotlight posts. I’m focusing on authors who qualified with short fiction. Debut novels generally get more attention (though I certainly won’t say enough!) and so I want to shout about the short stuff.

Kehkashan Khalid is a visual artist and writer whose short fiction includes “The Petticoat Government” (Fantasy), “The Shape of Snowflakes” (Translunar Travelers Lounge), and “Almost Human” (The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction Volume 2).

Isabel J. Kim is a Korean-American attorney, podcaster, and writer. Her short fiction includes “The Narrative Implications of Your Untimely Death” (Lightspeed), “Calf Cleaving in the Benthic Black” (Clarkesworld), “You, Me, Her, You, Her, I” (Strange Horizons), “Clay” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies), and the Shirley Jackson Award-winning “You’ll Understand When You’re a Mom Someday” (khōréō).

Annika Barranti Klein is a tired Angeleno writer, poet, copy editor, and photographer. Her published short fiction includes “The Big Deep” (Asimov’s Jul/Aug 22), “AITA for throwing away my wife’s haunted dolls?” (The Future Fire), “A Touch of Magic” (Kaleidotrope), and “Milk Teeth” (Weird Horror).

Jessica Lévai has a PhD in Egyptology and, after an extended stint adjuncting, now writes full time. Her novella, The Night Library of Sternendach: A Vampire Opera in Verse, came out in 2021, and her short fiction has appeared in Funny Times, Cossmass Infinities, A Quaint and Curious Volume of Gothic Tales, and In Somnio: A Collection of Modern Gothic Horror (we’re TOC buddies).

Nic Lipitz is a Brooklyn-based writer of science fiction and humor. Check out “The Office Drone” (Future SF Digest).

C. E. McGill is a once and current Scot, an academic interdisciplinarian and two-time finalist for the Dell Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. Their first novel, Our Hideous Progeny, is out later this year, and they have short fiction Fantasy (“Things to Bring, Things to Burn, Things Best Left Behind”) and Strange Constellations (“Passengers”).

Lindz McLeod is a queer, working-class Scottish writer of poetry and short fiction, including (but by no means limited to) “The Immortal Game” (Apex), “Them at Number Seventy-Four” (Pseudopod), “Hindbrain” (Fusion Fragment), “Town Called Malice” (Vastarien 5.1), and “Cake by the Ocean” (The Razor). She has a short story collection, Turkucken, published by Bear Creek Press.

Reed Mingault engages in various arts and crafts. Fans of worldbuilding and lichen may be interested in her contribution to the Building Beyond series. “The Scribe’s Garden” was a winner of the Cast of Wonders flash fiction contest

Kiran Kaur Saini is an award-winning Punjabi-American writer of films and fiction, and paddler of kayaks. Check out “Your Tomorrow Clothes” (Gulf Coast) and “Coiffeur Seven” (Strange Horizons); keep your eyes open for upcoming work in Bullet Points, The Fabulist, and F&SF.

Tehnuka is an Aotearoa New Zealand volcanologist whose stories include “Fortune Favors the Parrot” (The Writing Quarter), “El, the Plastotrophs, and Me” (Imagine 2200), “Stains of Home” (If There’s Anyone Left Vol. 3), “Why We Bury Our Dead at Sea” (Reckoning), and “Clutch. Stick. Shift.” (Mermaids Monthly and reprinted in Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy, Volume IV).

Ursula Whitcher is a mathematician, knitter, game designer, poet, and SCAdian whose short fiction includes “The Last Tutor” (Asimov’s), “The Association of Twelve Thousand Flowers” (Cossmass Infinities), “Alphabet of Signs” and “Jade Generals” (Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 99), and “The Spirits of Cabassus” (Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 228).

Eris Young is the fiction editor of Shoreline of Infinity, the recipient of a Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award, and author of books on the ace, nonbinary, and genderqueer experience. A number of their stories can be found for free online reading or listening, including “Idomeneja,” “Snow,” “The Archivist,” “Superfine,” and “Deal.”