Emily Tesh
Emily Tesh is a British author of science fiction and fantasy whose work has quickly established her as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary short-form speculative fiction. She studied classics at Oxford University and later earned a Master’s degree in creative writing, a background that gives her fiction both a structural elegance and a deep engagement with mythology, epic tradition, and the classical roots of the fantasy genre. She has spoken about the influence of her classical training on her approach to narrative and character, and that influence is evident in the formal ambition of her work.
Some Desperate Glory (2023), available on WritersReview, is Tesh’s debut novel and was one of the most critically acclaimed science fiction releases of its year. The novel follows Kyr, a young woman raised in a brutal military cult on a space station, the last remnant of humanity following the destruction of Earth by an alien collective. Kyr has been trained her entire life for a final act of revenge against the aliens who destroyed her world. But the novel, structured with careful precision, systematically dismantles everything Kyr believes — about her history, her identity, her enemies, and her purpose — in a story that is simultaneously a gripping space opera and a devastating examination of how ideology, indoctrination, and trauma shape the self. Some Desperate Glory won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2024.
Before Some Desperate Glory, Tesh published two acclaimed novellas: Silver in the Wood (2019), a quiet, lyrical fantasy about a man who has lived alone in a forest for centuries, and its sequel Drowned Country (2020). Both were published by Tor.com Publishing and received the Alex Award, a prize given by the American Library Association to books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults. These earlier works established her talent for writing emotionally resonant fantasy with a strong sense of place and a warm, humane sensibility — qualities that make the structural brutality of Some Desperate Glory all the more effective by contrast.
Tesh’s range is striking: from the gentle pastoral fantasy of her novellas to the hard-edged, politically charged science fiction of her debut novel, she demonstrates a writer who is not interested in settling into a comfortable niche but in pushing her own capabilities to their limits. Her work consistently engages with questions of loyalty, belief, and the difficulty of changing one’s mind in the face of deeply held conviction, and does so with a formal intelligence and emotional generosity that marks her as a significant new presence in British speculative fiction.