Year's Best Weird Fiction

Chen Qiufan is an award-winning science fiction writer. He grew up near Guiyu, China, home to the world’s largest e-waste recycling center, an area the UN called an “environmental calamity.” His experiences there inspired the Waste Tide. He currently lives in Shanghai and Beijing and works as the founder of Thema Mundi Studio.

Sofia Samatar's first novel, A Stranger in Olondria, won the 2014 William L. Crawford Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and was included in Time Magazine's list of the 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time. She also received the 2014 Astounding Award for Best New Writer. Her novel The Winged Histories completed the Olondria duology, and was followed by Tender: Stories, Monster Portraits (with the artist Del Samatar), and The White Mosque: A Memoir. Sofia lives in Virginia and teaches at James Madison University.

Anna Taborska writes horror stories and screenplays with tales appearing in over forty anthologies. She has been nominated for a British Fantasy Award three times, and for a Bram Stoker Award® five times. Anna has also directed five films.

MICHAEL KELLY was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England. Educated at the University of Hull, he served for twelve years in the Royal Navy before joining the British police and working as a detective in the Regional Crime Squad, Major Crime and Surveillance Units for twenty-five years. After a serious injury on duty, he was retired from the police in 1999. Since then Michael has been a guide and a military historian on the battlefields of the Western Front and Normandy. He is founder member of the Nolan Group, which is engaged in the exploration of the site and action where Alvin C. York was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in the Argonne Forest, France. Michael is former chair of the H.M.S. Ganges Association, a past president of Grimsby Rugby Union Football Club and President of the Lincolnshire Rugby Football Union.

Paul Tremblay is the multiple award-winning, critically acclaimed, New York Times bestselling author of eight previous novels (Horror Movie, The Pallbearers Club, Survivor Song, The Cabin at the End of the World, Disappearance at Devil's Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, No Sleep Till Wonderland, and The Little Sleep); a middle-grade novel, Another; and two short fiction collections (The Beast You Are and Growing Things). He lives outside of Boston with his family.

Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Hummingbird Salamander; the Borne novels (Borne, The Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts); and the Southern Reach series (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance, and Absolution), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Alex Garland. VanderMeer has spoken at MIT, Columbia, Yale, and Vanderbilt, and he gave the 2024 John Hersey Memorial Address at the Key West Literary Seminar. His environmental nonfiction has appeared in Time, The Nation, and Esquire, among other publications. VanderMeer founded the Sunshine State Biodiversity Group nonprofit in 2023.

Jeffrey Ford is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, the Edgar Award–winning The Girl in the Glass, The Cosmology of the Wider World, The Shadow Year, and The Twilight Pariah, and his collections include The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, The Drowned Life, Crackpot Palace, and A Natural History of Hell. He lives near Columbus, Ohio, and teaches writing at Ohio Wesleyan University.

Richard Gavin is a critically-acclaimed author whose work explores the realm where dread and the sublime intersect. His supernatural tales have been published in four collections, including THE DARKLY SPLENDID REALM and AT FEAR'S ALTAR, and have been selected for BEST NEW HORROR, THE YEAR'S BEST WEIRD FICTION, and THE BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR. In 2015 he co-edited (with Patricia Cram and Daniel A. Schulke) PENUMBRAE: AN OCCULT FICTION ANTHOLOGY. Richard has also published several occult works for periodicals such as Starfire Journal and Clavis: Journal of Occult Arts, Letters and Experience. THE BENIGHTED PATH: PRIMEVAL GNOSIS AND THE MONSTROUS SOUL, his non-fiction book that explores Night Consciousness, was released in 2016.

Maria Dahvana Headley is a New York Times bestselling novelist, memoirist, and editor, most recently of Magonia, Queen of Kings, and the anthology Unnatural Creatures (coeditor with Neil Gaiman). Her short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula and Shirley Jackson Awards. She lives in Brooklyn in an apartment with a seven-foot stuffed crocodile and constellations on the ceiling. You can find her at www.mariadahvanaheadley.com

John Langan is the author of two novels, The Fisherman and House of Windows, and two collections of stories, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters. With Paul Tremblay, he coedited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters. He's one of the founders of the Shirley Jackson Awards, for which he served as a juror during its first three years. Currently, he reviews horror and dark fantasy for Locus magazine.