In 2018, N.K. Jemisin became the first author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel in three consecutive years, each award going to a book in her widely-heralded Broken Earth series.
As a child, the New York-based author was an avid reader of sci-fi and fantasy but she rarely came across characters that looked like her.
These days, Jemisin is one of the biggest names in contemporary sci-fi, and continuously breaks the status quo as a black woman in a male-dominated field.
N. K. Jemisin Photo: AFP / FILE
She tells Kim Hill she started reading fairy tales as a child and never really departed from that.
“There’s long been a tendency to relegate fantasy to the realm of children, but it never really has been. There’s plenty of congruity between adult myth making and fairy tales are more of a lesser, more didactic versions of the myths that used to be exchanged through oral traditions and still are in some parts of the world.
“The only reason we say they’re for children is a Western, sort of Victorian thing. Stories of the fantastical have been the realm of adults for millennia and are becoming so again in the form of modern fantasy.”
Jemisin’s latest series centres of her home city of New York and she describes herself as a city girl.
“I did spend a good chunk of my youth growing up in a smaller town, living in the suburbs and so on, but up until about the age of five or so, I lived in New York and spent every summer there thereafter after my parents divorced.
“I spent the majority of my youth shuttling between more rural suburban life and New York City and I decided, ultimately, that I like New York City better. I’ve also lived in New Orleans, Boston and a few other major cities in the United States and I’ve come to realise each of them has a personality and that was the inspiration for this.”
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Thinking she couldn’t make a living as a writer, Jemisin first studied psychology and practised for a number of years.
“Some of that is the usual process that all writers go through of trying to figure out if they’re good enough to get into a field that’s going to require that kind of sacrifice. I wanted a steady job, I wanted health insurance, all the things you can’t get as a writer right now unless you’re extremely successful.
“I went into psychology because I found it interesting and I worked in that field for 20 years before I did finally quit my day job and become a full time writer just because I enjoyed it. Writing and psychology are very similar in that they’re both ways of examining the human condition. A lot of the work that I did as a psychologist ended up informing my writing.”
However, Jemisin is a prolific author having published almost a book a year and she says doing both her psychology work and writing took a toll.
“That was not fun. What it meant was that I never got vacations. I would come home from work in the evenings and I would start writing. It probably helps that I don’t have kids. There are people who are full time writers and full time workers who have children but they have supportive spouses.”
And through that, her career has been dogged by racism which she outlined in her acceptance speech for the 2018 Hugo Award.
“Probably sexism too, but it’s difficult for a black woman to extricate the two. We combine it and call it misogynoir. I was speaking to the fact that it took me several years to break in as an artist. My first book actually published, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, was not actually the first book that I wrote.
“The first book that I wrote and sent out to publishing companies was The Killing Moon which is a bog-standard fantasy novel in every way, it’s just set in a fantasy analogue of ancient Egypt and featured a predominantly black cast. It did get published later and went on to be nominated for a Nebula and some other awards and it sold well, it obviously was a good book, but five years earlier I couldn’t get it published for love or money because it was full of black people.”
She says publishers danced around the issue of race by saying things like they weren’t sure who the audience would be or how to market the book.
“The implication is basically that the science fiction and fantasy readership is white and, this book is fantasy, but you’re black and the characters are black, so this is a mismatch.”
Jemisin will be speaking at the 2022 Aotearoa New Zealand Festival of the Arts to discuss the ways in which sci-fi and fantasy can illuminate some of the biggest themes of humanity: inequality, oppression and conflicts of culture. She will also be discussing her latest book, The City We Became, the beginning of her Great Cities trilogy.
