Kameron Hurley
"We Have Always Fought" is Kameron Hurley's most-discussed piece of writing, an essay that earned her the Hugo Award for Best Related Work and brought her work to a broad readership within speculative fiction circles.
Hurley was born on January 12, 1980, in Battle Ground, and later studied at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She works as a novelist and science fiction writer, producing fiction across the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and thriller, with a feminist perspective running through her output. Her novels include the Bel Dame Apocrypha series, the Worldbreaker Saga, The Stars Are Legion, and The Light Brigade, and she has also published the essay collection The Geek Feminist Revolution.
In addition to the Hugo Award for Best Related Work, Hurley has received the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. Her work has earned recognition outside the United States as well: she received the Ignotus Award for Best Foreign Novel and the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer.
Hurley's awards span both fiction and nonfiction, and her output covers multiple series alongside standalone novels and essay writing, all produced in English. The Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer stands as one of her earlier honors, marking a concrete point in a body of work that has since grown to include the novel The Light Brigade and the Worldbreaker Saga, among others.
Quotes by Kameron Hurley
Kameron Hurley's insights on:
Half the world is full of women, but it's rare to hear a narrative that doesn't speak of women as the people who have things done to them instead of the people who do things. More often, women are talked about as a man's daughter. A man's wife.
Before I wrote 'God's War,' I probably did eight years of research into the Middle East, Judaism, Islam, Catholicisim, and all sorts of fabulous other things.
What I found so captivating about the idea of being a writer was having the ability to write down all these things I made up in my head so other people could see them.
My parents both worked full-time flipping burgers at the local fast-food joint, and my grandmother looked after us. English was her second language, so instead of books, I learned spoken French nursery rhymes and curse words.
I know a lot of writers who tell me they 'always' knew how to read. They can't remember a time before reading. And those writers make me want to tear my hair out.
While many alternate reality stories ask, 'What might have been?' parallel universe stories literalize the war between good and evil that plays inside each of us every day. It's what makes this type of story so perfect for many fantasy tales: we're all just a coin flip away from being entirely different people.
When I was a kid, I watched a lot of 'Twilight Zone.' My mother was obsessed with the show, as it was a staple of her childhood - and thus she made it one of ours, too.
As a science fiction and fantasy writer, I used to love writing bleak, grimdark futures full of bleak, grimdark people. But I've found that as the world around me darkens, all I really want to do is grasp for more light.