N.K. Jemisin
N.K. Jemisin is one of the most celebrated and influential science fiction and fantasy authors of her generation, best known for achieving an unprecedented feat in the history of the Hugo Awards. Born Nora Keita Jemisin in Iowa City, Iowa, in 1974, she grew up in New York City and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and earned a Master’s degree in counselling psychology from the University of Massachusetts Boston. She worked as a career counsellor and psychologist for many years before transitioning to full-time writing, and her psychological training is evident in the emotional depth and complexity of her characters.
Jemisin made her debut with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms in 2010, which was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. But it is her Broken Earth trilogy that has defined her literary legacy. The first volume, The Fifth Season (2015), available on WritersReview, is a seismic work of speculative fiction — both literally and figuratively. Set on a continent wracked by catastrophic geological events, it follows three women whose stories are connected across time in ways that gradually reveal the full horror and beauty of the world Jemisin has constructed. The Fifth Season won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2016. Its sequels, The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky, won the Hugo in 2017 and 2018 respectively, making Jemisin the first person in the award’s history to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugos.
The Broken Earth trilogy is remarkable for multiple reasons beyond its awards. Its second-person narration — rare in any fiction, almost unheard of in fantasy — creates an intimate, implicating relationship between reader and protagonist that is central to the novels’ emotional impact. The trilogy engages directly with questions of race, oppression, environmental catastrophe, and intergenerational trauma, using the freedoms of speculative fiction to illuminate aspects of human experience that realist fiction can only approach obliquely. The geological metaphor is not decoration but argument: Jemisin is writing about what it means to live in a society built on the exploitation and destruction of some people for the benefit of others.
Her subsequent work includes The City We Became (2020) and its sequel The World We Make (2022), urban fantasy novels in which the boroughs of New York City come to life as human avatars fighting a Lovecraftian threat — a series that also serves as a celebration of urban diversity and a meditation on the forces that seek to destroy multicultural communities. Jemisin received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2020, a so-called “genius grant,” in recognition of her contributions to literature. She is a transformative figure in American fiction, and her influence on the science fiction and fantasy field has been immeasurable.
