N. K. Jemisin

N. K. Jemisin is an American writer of speculative fiction and a 2020 MacArthur Fellow. Before becoming a full-time writer in 2016, she worked in higher education as a counseling psychologist. Her bibliography includes the Inheritance trilogy, the Dreamblood duology, the Great Cities books and the story collection How Long ’Til Black Future Month?

Her fiction draws freely from fantasy and science fiction while challenging familiar assumptions about who holds power in imagined societies. Structural oppression, environmental crisis, fractured families and the search for community recur throughout her work. She is also known for experimenting with viewpoint, especially in the Broken Earth trilogy.

The Fifth Season opens that trilogy on the geologically unstable continent called the Stillness. Its three central perspectives follow Essun, a mother searching for her abducted daughter; Damaya, a child taken away for training; and Syenite, whose abilities are controlled by an exploitative institution. The novel won the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Its sequels, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky, won the same award in 2017 and 2018, making Jemisin the first author to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugos. The Stone Sky also received the Nebula Award for Best Novel.

Start with The Fifth Season. It introduces Jemisin’s most celebrated series and shows her at her strongest: building a civilization around catastrophe, revealing its cruelties through intimate lives, and using narrative structure to turn identity itself into a discovery.