About Jo Walton

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Jo trying to cheer up a stone lion in Florence, Summer 2011.

Jo Walton has published fifteen novels, most recently Or What You Will . She has also published three poetry collections, two essay collections and a short story collection. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2002, the World Fantasy Award for Tooth and Claw in 2004, the Hugo and Nebula awards for Among Others in 2012,  and in 2014 both the Tiptree Award for My Real Children and the Locus Non Fiction award for What Makes This Book So Great. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are much better. She gets bored easily so she tends to write books that are different from each other. She also reads a lot, enjoys travel, talking about books, and eating great food. She plans to live to be ninety-nine and write a book every year.

Jo, Emmet and Sasha, July 28th 2001

Jo, Emmet and Alexander, July 28th 2001

Not a Bio for Wiscon:

Jo Walton
has run out of eggs and needs to go buy some,
she has no time to write a bio
as she wants to make spanakopita today.
She also wants to write a new chapter
and fix the last one.
Oh yes, she writes stuff,
when people leave her alone to get on with it
and don’t demand bios
and proofreading and interviews
and dinner.
Despite constant interruptions
she has published nine novels
in the last forty-eight years
and started lots of others.
She won the Campbell for Best New Writer in 2002
when she was 38.

By Farah Mendlesohn

Stunned and awed, with Hugo, September 2012

She has also written half a ton of poetry
which isn’t surprising as she finds poetry
considerably easier to write
than short bios listing her accomplishments.
She is married, with one (grown up, awesome) son
who lives nearby with his girlfriend and two cats.
She also has lots of friends
who live all over the planet
who she doesn’t see often enough.
She remains confused by punctuation,
“who” and “whom”
and “that” and “which”.
She cannot sing and has trouble with arithmetic
also, despite living ten years in Montreal
her French still sucks.

Nevertheless her novel Among Others
won a Hugo and a Nebula
so she must be doing something right
at least way back when she wrote it
it’ll probably never work again.
She also won a World Fantasy Award in 2004
for an odd book called Tooth and Claw
in which everyone is dragons.
Looking out to sea, Oslo, October 2013

Looking out to sea, Oslo, October 2013

She comes from South Wales
and identifies ethnically
as a Romano-Briton
but she emigrated to Canada
because it seemed a better place
to stand to build the future.
She blogs about old books on Tor.com
and posts poetry and recipes and wordcount on her LJ
and is trying to find something to bribe herself with
as a reward for writing a bio
that isn’t chocolate.
April 2013
Update, February 2016
Since then she has written another four novels,
won the Tiptree Award for My Real Children
and the Locus Best Non-Fiction for her collection of blog posts
and her son has broken up with his girlfriend
though they’re still good friends.
She knows it’s a cliche, but tonight’s dinner will be stew,
followed by blackcurrant crumble,
because
she has run out of eggs.