Tamsyn Muir


Tamsyn Muir is a New Zealand author of fantasy, science fiction and horror genres. She has been nominated for several awards, and her first novel was published in 2019.

Early life & education

Muir was born March 14, 1985 in New South Wales, Australia. She moved to New Zealand when she was nine months old, and grew up in Howick, New Zealand. In 2010, she earned a degree in education. She is also a 2010 graduate of the Clarion Workshop.

Work

Muir's short story "The Deepwater Bride", published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 2015, was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novelette, the World Fantasy Award—Short Fiction, the Eugie Award and the Shirley Jackson Award for best novelette.
Gideon the Ninth, Muir's first novel and the first book of the Locked Tomb trilogy, was published in 2019. It was awarded the 2020 Locus Award for Best First Novel and the 2020 Crawford Award, presented annually by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel. It finished third in the Goodreads Choice Awards for best science fiction in 2019. The front cover blurb by Charles Stross describes the story as "Lesbian necromancers explore a haunted gothic palace in space!". Constance Grady notes: "Throughout, Muir’s prose is sleek and compulsively readable. She has a genius for sliding her voice seamlessly from Lovecraftian gothic mode into a slangy contemporary mode without ever undercutting one or the other for cheap comedy. Instead, the contemporary mode makes the cast of characters feel familiar and recognizable, the Lovecraftian horror makes the world feel expansive and terrifying, and the slippage between both powers the book forward." Jason Sheehan said: "Gideon the Ninth is too funny to be horror, too gooey to be science fiction, has too many spaceships and autodoors to be fantasy, and has far more bloody dismemberings than your average parlor romance. It is altogether its own thing — brilliantly original, messy and weird straight through."
Other books in the trilogy will be Harrow the Ninth, coming 2020, and Alecto the Ninth in 2021.

The Locked Tomb

Short stories

Muir lives and works in Oxford, United Kingdom. She is a lesbian.