Tim Pratt
Tim Pratt is an American science fiction and fantasy author, editor, and poet whose prolific output across multiple formats and genres has made him one of the more versatile and consistently entertaining writers in contemporary speculative fiction. He has published dozens of novels and short story collections, worked as a senior editor at Locus magazine for many years, and maintains one of the most productive writing schedules in the field. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family and continues to produce new work at a remarkable pace.
His career encompasses epic fantasy (the Marla Mason urban fantasy series), science fiction (the Axiom space opera trilogy), and numerous standalones across the genre spectrum. Prison of Sleep (2021), available on WritersReview, is the second book in his Journals of Zaxony Delatree series and continues the story of a man who involuntarily travels between parallel worlds when he sleeps — a premise that allows Pratt to indulge his considerable talent for world-building variety while maintaining narrative momentum and emotional continuity across radically different settings. The series has been praised for its imaginative inventiveness, its likeable protagonist, and its fast, entertaining pace.
Pratt won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 2007 for “Impossible Dreams,” a love story set in a video shop that rents films from alternate timelines, which exemplifies his gift for the concise and emotionally resonant short fiction at which he excels. His short work has appeared in virtually every major science fiction venue, and his collections demonstrate the range of his imagination and the consistency of his craft across very different tonal registers — from whimsical comedy to cosmic horror to domestic realism with fantastical elements.
As an editor at Locus, Pratt has maintained a close engagement with the science fiction field as a whole, reviewing and covering the field with a breadth of knowledge that informs his own creative work. He is known in the community for his generosity, his accessibility, and his enthusiasm for the genre in all its forms. His career demonstrates that sustained productivity and genuine quality are not in competition, and that a writer who loves what they do can keep doing it well for a very long time.
