Thomas Olde Heuvelt


Thomas Olde Heuvelt is a Dutch writer whose horror novel HEX has been translated into nine languages and published in fourteen countries, among them the US, France, China, and Brazil. His short stories have received the Hugo Award for Best Novelette, the Dutch Paul Harland Prize, and have been nominated for two additional Hugo Awards and a World Fantasy Award.

Early life and influences

Olde Heuvelt was born in Nijmegen, Netherlands. He studied English and American Literature at the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen and at the University of Ottawa in Canada, where he lived for half a year. In many interviews, he recalls that the literary heroes of his childhood were Roald Dahl and Stephen King, who created in him a love for grim and dark fiction. He later discovered the works of a wider range of contemporary writers such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Neil Gaiman, and Yann Martel, whom he calls his greatest influences.

Career

Heuvelt wrote his debut novel De Onvoorziene in Dutch at the age of nineteen. It was published with a small printing in 2002, and followed in 2004 by PhantasAmnesia, a 600-page novel in which he combined horror with humor and satire. Since 2008, his novels have been published with major Dutch publishing house Luitingh-Sijthoff.
Heuvelt is a multiple winner of the Paul Harland Prize for best Dutch work of fantastic fiction. Translated into English, his short story "The Boy Who Cast No Shadow", published by PS Publishing in the UK, was nominated for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards in 2012. The same story was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2013.
In April, 2013, Tor Books released his story "The Ink Readers of Doi Saket" as an e-book. It would be nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story and the World Fantasy Award in 2014.
Heuvelt's story "The Day the World Turned Upside Down", published in Lightspeed Magazine, won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2015.
In 2016, Heuvelt's worldwide debut novel HEX was published in the US by Tor Books and in the UK and Australia by Hodder and Stoughton. Horror novelist Stephen King tweeted about the book, calling it "totally, brilliantly original". The publication was followed by a six-week book tour through the US.

Honors